Renewal and Play

To renew ourselves throughout busy and ever-changing careers and lives requires access to our inner sources of creativity and play. Play may be the simplest thing there is for a child. Children are in a state of perpetual metamorphosis; they have the capacity to move quickly from the fantastic to the everyday and back again, all in a moment. They play as the spirit moves them. As we grow and experience the complexities of life, play becomes a difficult achievement. Yet that same spirit of play is essential in our later years. As one ages one must foster tinkering, discovery, and creative renewal.

We are constantly required to adapt to a changing world, often in ways that we cannot anticipate. Perhaps that is why play is seen among all the higher mammals. A creature that plays is more readily adaptable to changing contexts and conditions. With fewer pre-programmed or instinctive patterns of behavior than other creatures, humans have the greatest capacity and need for play, applying our intelligence and imagination.

Play provides new approaches to problems and introduces new concepts. Even the most serious people have some play in their daily lives, though we may not think of it that way. A most common form of play is ordinary speech. We draw upon structures provided by our culture, vocabulary and grammar, but the sentences we make up with them are entirely our own. Listen to a conversation in a foreign language, or ignore the content of a conversation in English and notice its process: the stops and starts, when the voice goes up and down, the rhythm of taking turns. Every conversation is a creative act.

Any time we are preparing a meal, this too is a form of play. It can be simple and perfunctory or a work of art. It can include wild improvisations, “let’s throw a little pineapple in the chili,” or it can stick to the tried-and-true recipe.

Writing, painting, surgery, debugging a computer program, invention, “playing” the stock market, tuning an engine -- all creative acts, some of them bloody serious -- draw upon our capacity to play. Play pervades every facet of our life and is the force behind rituals, the arts, sports, and civilization itself.

We not only have inborn neurological and linguistic capacities for abstracting information and turning it into symbols, we also quite clearly enjoy playing with information in this manner. Many of the inventions, innovations, and flights of fancy created by humans have no immediate biological value; rather, they are elaborate games we impose upon reality.

When work or life gets bogged down and frustrating it is often because we are taking “the work” and ourselves too seriously. Laughter itself is a mystery. To laugh at oneself and one’s circumstances requires a playful attitude. I have laughed with clients facing the direst of circumstances, including chronic illness and death – when a patient takes the lead and indicates the need for such talk.

Emergence is a scientific term for describing creative play in evolution. Emergence is the surprising capacity for the whole to equal more than the sum of the parts. It appears suddenly and cannot be predicted. It is more poetic than logical, more synchronistic than linear, bringing together seemingly disparate elements to create new synthesis, new meanings. When different parts or aspects of any system are put together in just the right way, something new emerges—a quality or property that could not be predicted from the parts alone.

To reflect more on the power of play, please see the wonderful book, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, written by my friend Stephen Nachmanovitch.