Working hard at play

Children know what I am talking about here. It’s the adults who find it confusing.

Close your eyes and imagine a children’s playground. Then ask yourself a simple question: what’s going on?

If you look carefully, beyond the screams of delight and screams of pain (falling over is all part of effective play), you will almost always catch sight of curious young minds working hard at play: actively engaging all their available senses in a frantic effort to make sense of the world around them.

And, believe me, this play is serious!

So let’s look a while longer and consider the three features of any good playground: safety, clear boundaries and connection to the work-a-day world.

1. Safety: It is almost too obvious to mention, but playgrounds have to be safe spaces for the children who play in them. At the same time, they have to be challenging enough to encourage appropriate risk-taking and the desire to (literally) reach new heights. If you consider that storybooks, in a very similar way, are ‘playgrounds’, the same principle applies. The witches and monsters in all good tales are always powerful enough to transport children in their imagination towards the darker side of humanity. In the end, though, they are safe enough not to cause any real or lasting harm.

2. Clear boundaries: Boundaries are essential in all good play activity. Whether it is a game of football, an imagination-filled ‘den’, or a simple game of dressing up, there is always a line in the sand where the magic stops. In other words, play is all about the transition from ‘normal’ life to another, where these normal ‘rules’ simply no longer apply – a world in which we can fly, realize our dreams, and become a princess.

3. Connection to the work-a-day world: There is always a wardrobe or some other literal or metaphorical gateway dividing Narnia and what we tend to call ‘reality’. Necessarily, though, this is a very permeable membrane, allowing children to cross backwards and forwards, carrying with them huge existential issues of life and death, love, power and relationships, good and evil. Defeating the witch in Narnia is practice for the challenges that all of us will have to face at one time or another against far more menacing enemies.

This is just to get you thinking. But before you start assuming that this is nothing more than child’s play, think again. We grow up and are quickly educated out of playful activity (normally by the age of 12), but it doesn’t mean that play loses any of its importance for human existence. On the contrary, to be human is to understand life as a constant ‘oscillation’ between, on the one hand, periods of autonomous activity and, on the other, contact with sources of physical or symbolic renewal.

... a shifting back and forth between being dependent upon a trusted other and actively exploring the world. We all venture out like children ranging out into the park in play, but from time to time we need to come running back to Mother for renewal. We can then go running off again on our own. Sometimes we need to regress to go forward. (Bruce Reed, The Dynamics of Religion)

Here’s the point: watching Arsenal football club; going to the cinema; reading a good novel; attending a funeral; singing at the top of your voice in the rain... they are all entirely positive forms of authentic play activity that, far from being distractions from the business of living, are necessary ‘resting places’ along life’s sometimes difficult path; giving us a chance to stop, take a breath, lift our eyes, look around and get our bearings.

There is a paradox, however, in all this.

You see, in order to be truly authentic, play activity needs to be a ‘letting go’ of the work-a-day world and a giving of oneself over to carefree, pointless, creative imagination; it cannot be something we consciously ‘work’ on, as if looking for a return on our investment. Rather, we must yield to the magic, lose ourselves for a while, pre-empt the future and give lie to the inconvenient world of fact – with not a thought as to what impact it will have upon the rest of our lives.

And no one should make us feel guilty for doing so. Every great idea, invention, breakthrough began somewhere in a playground. So we had better learn how to get back there.

Realistically, though, children were always a lot better at finding their way back to Narnia than we adults. But imagine a world in which we learned from our children and discovered a more playful way of being... of working.

Infinite possibilities.

It is easy to blame others for the state we are in. But it was during the Reformation that we lost sight of homo ludens and began to think of ourselves differently. The Protestant Work Ethic was all about homo faber. It was suddenly all about what we made, built, thought... everything had to be useful; everything had to be given a price.

Surely, though, it’s time to change. Time to play more. Time to imagine the impact it would have on who we were, what we could achieve and what we will pass on to our children who come after us.

Not that they need us to pass on our wisdom. Skipping around the playground, it appears they know the secret already.