musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

We are the most human when we play freely, imaginatively, pointlessly.


In the inevitable progression of my octogenarianship, I almost seem to have forgotten about play. That’s a disappointing thing to realize; how could I ever forget that? Not playing in something like a game, or a competition you understand; but simply playing: free, spontaneous, unstructured play; the kind with no winner, no score, and no particular goal: kicking at a random can on the sidewalk, or rolling in autumn leaves in a field; unstructured time by and large: play!

I mean, are many people so afraid of unstructured time that they feel a need to fill it with staring and scrolling on their phones? Is it boredom, or the fear of what an unoccupied space might do to the mind: that it might float uncontrollably and, on an unexpected eddy, drift into unknown territory? Who knows what floats in there?

Is it a fear that unsuspected things might snag on an unwary thought? After all, there is no nothing in the mind…

Despite my years in a variety of jobs, I struggle to think of many examples of pure, uncompetitive play in adults nowadays. Anytime we want to score something, rate it, or rank our performance (even competing with one’s previous performance, be it solo or with others) it’s no longer really ‘play’. Its value has been captured: we have been captured.[i]

The Dutch historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga argued in his 1938 Homo Ludens that play is not marginal to civilisation but, rather, generative of it: ‘law, philosophy, poetry… all emerge from play’s ‘magic circle’: the bounded space where ordinary rules are suspended and something else becomes possible.’ It’s not that we have killed play; we have captured it and harnessed it to a productivity framework. Then we packaged and sold it for consumption: sold it as a competition, a challenge…

So, should we just stop keeping score with our activities? Surely that in itself wouldn’t constitute play though. If an activity arises spontaneously, and with no particular aim in mind, or structure attached, isn’t that more like play?

I think one may reasonably ask if Play occupies an in-between space: a space that has no winners and losers; a space whose rules (if there are any) are usually non-binding. It is an often purposeful space between things: like the Japanese concept of ma. It is not a void; not a nothing: the space and silence is an active, living presence. It is an essential interval that gives shape, meaning, and relationship to objects, sounds, or events. Like, for example, the space between flowers, the pause between words, the hush that follows a wonderful piece of music… It is, in other words, a transitional space where imagination and creativity live. Where play sometimes peeks out from just around the corner…

As the article I have footnoted suggests, ‘in ordinary perception, the world is simply there and the self-adjusts to it’; in play however, ‘we co-create the world, forging something between self and environment’. And what do the rest of us do as we watch others play? We live our lives ‘on someone else’s terms, following scripts, bowing before scores and metrics: moving through a world already defined in advance.’

I suppose that’s a little bit harsh, but sometimes, like those who play, we need to step outside ourselves and surrender to an imagined world where we don’t have to make sense. Even something as simple as exercise can be a form of bodily play. Not necessarily purposive exercise, mind you: not timing yourself or your steps, or logging it into you phone’s GPS. Simply walking to no place in particular and letting your mind float aimlessly along the way is valuable. In a way, that’s playing isn’t it? No goals, no structure, no stated objectives, no competition…

And, like the results of playing, there can be unexpected rewards. As even my occasional readers will remember, I often wander in the woods near my house. Admittedly I usually follow the trails, but wandering is like that isn’t it? The walk is, by and large, a cooperative effort, and so smoothly melded by the constituents that the me somewhere inside can play with its thoughts almost the entire journey.

Actually, I’m not exactly sure what constitutes a me but whatever it is, it often notices things along the way which, for that moment, seem possessed of a sort of fairytale agency: a solitary giant spruce whose bark, for a while at least, is composed of fish scales slowly climbing up towards the sky.

Or, I remember a chilly and wet autumn day when I felt sorry for a bedraggled burdock, whose still remaining stock of Velcro attachments were weighed down in the rain. Each of its several branches still clutched multiple unspent and presumably useless burrs that it had saved over the summer, thinking they might still prove valuable procreative tools one day. But no animal had brushed past, and the long days of summer with its wealth of visitors had disappeared.

Aesop’s ant was writ large: the burdock had saved its summer treasure, its only tools, but for what? Was this simply my imagination enshrubbed? Had my Muse again roused itself to play a game to confuse me even more, or was there a moral in this somewhere -a lesson to be learned? My free-form thoughts were seldom content to present a fully-formed idea; I realized that, like so many other things on a walk, I would have to leave it lying fallow for a while until it matured.

I don’t know if I can explain it; I don’t know that I even have to: aren’t encounters like that the reason to wander? Isn’t that play? Am I not playing in my mind? I mean in a light-hearted sort of way, the trail is just a means; the walk is the destination.

Or looking at it in a different way, I am the destination…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/play-is-doing-its-work-even-if-were-not-keeping-score

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