Work, work, work, work, work.
For many people, this is what their entire lives revolve around. Working. So much so that they have very little time to actually live.
However, for more progressive individuals and organizations today, life-longing learning is becoming just as important as work, especially in relation to the future of work that’s emerging right now.
Because of this, what appears to be happening is that no longer does learning just happen in the early stages of our lives but it’s becoming a life-long, daily endeavour.
But what about playing though?
If learning is becoming a daily endeavour, just as much as working, what about playing?
Perhaps it depends upon what we mean by playing?
If we perceive playing as some frivolous, childish activity that is often a waste of time than, more often than not, playing obviously won’t be a part of the future of work.
However, if we perceive playing as something much more substantial than the conventional aspect of it, perhaps it can be something integral to our daily lives, just as much as working and learning can be.
To begin to transform our understanding and perception of playing, let’s get Stuart Brown to help us by referring to some of his quotes from his book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.
I have found that remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being. The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships and being a creative, innovative person.
Once people understand what play does for them, they can learn to bring a sense of excitement and adventure back to their lives, make work an extension of their play lives, and engage fully with the world.
Ultimately, this book is about understanding the role of play and using it to find and express our own core truths. It is about learning to harness a force that has been built into us through millions of years of evolution, a force that allows us to both discover our most essential selves and enlarge our world. We are designed to find fulfillment and creative growth through play.
The genius of play is that, in playing, we create imaginative new cognitive combinations. And in creating those novel combinations, we find what works.
The truth is that play seems to be one of the most advanced methods nature has invented to allow a complex brain to create itself.
Of all animal species, humans are the biggest players of all. We are built to play and built through play. When we play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality. Is it any wonder that often the times we feel most alive, those that make up our best memories, are moments of play?
Stepping out of a normal routine, finding novelty, being open to serendipity, enjoying the unexpected, embracing a little risk, and finding pleasure in the heightened vividness of life. These are all qualities of a state of play.
To sum up with Stuart Brown is saying here, play isn’t just a pastime—it’s a natural drive and orientation to life that sparks creativity, reveals our true selves, deepens connection, and turns everyday life into a joyful adventure.
To take this a step further though, in terms of understanding how play specifically is integral to our development and “levelling up” in life, not just as children but as adults as well, let’s get D. Stephenson Bond to help us by referring to some of the quotes from his book Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life.
I want to suggest for now that play is our participation in the process of our own development through the imagination. Adults mature through play just as children mature through play precisely insofar as play represents the intermediate step from potential development to actual “work.”
There is a movement beyond conscious play. We all have private fantasies. We all have guiding fictions of our life in our “personal intermediate areas,” that we may or may not share with others whom we trust. But there comes a time when we must make a claim, when simple insight seeks a lifestyle; a time when we’ve played long enough with what may or may not be, and in that day simple play becomes a game with rules for living meaningfully.
There must be a middle ground, a place between two worlds. There must be a place where inner life can find the validation to hold itself together. At the same time there must be a place where outer life can open itself to imagination rich enough to offer meaning. There must be an “intermediate area of experience,” as Winnicott said, where what is subjectively conceived of meets what is objectively given—in other words, a place to play in trust so strong it becomes a way of life.
What is risked in play is the sense of self. Therefore, the building of the symbolic field has to do with the building of trust in the sense of self that is risked in play.
After the field is prepared, at a certain point in this creative process a person is ready to play. A moment comes when there is simply no other choice. We have to liberate ourselves from the idea that playing is for children. Playing, as we shall see, is for maturation. In that sense, as Jung said, play becomes serious.
And then comes immersion, the moment of being lost in play. This is the transitional state, a different state of consciousness. The potential space “is akin to the preoccupation that characterizes the playing of a young child.” Immersion is an in-between state. “This area of playing is not inner psychic reality….It it outside the individual, but it is not the external world.” Immersion is the sense of fantasy activity becoming “real.” Then the writer feels the story writing itself and hours are lost.
What emerges in play is crucial. Three remarkable things occur in play: something emerges from within (potential); something emerges at the right time (developmental work); something is formed (a sense of self).
The phenomenon of imagination has to do with the emergence of a content from what in potential is only form. The virtual miracle of the creative act is through the crystallization of what is needed but not known—a pattern inherent in the situation. Play is an event, a true gestalt—something potential evolves into something actual. Through playing the pattern is recognized. And we’ve stumbled on quite a different way of knowing. Potential, hidden in the unconscious matrix, is “known” through play that gives it substance.
The subtle aspect of potential forms and possibilities is that the moment they are actualized, they cease to be potential at all. The actualization never really fullyincarnates the potential. Therefore, what actualizes is the resonance. What emerges is a metaphor, which connects the potential with the actual. Metaphor is play.
It is the yearning for development, for evolution. What emerges in play wants to go somewhere. Play becomes developmental work.
Maturation, fully living the pattern of development, leads to a growing sense of self. The play on the symbolic field must eventually lead to something durable and vital. Play aims at coalescing into a work, an “opus.” The structure that emerges in play is the sense of our self as a “self.” If I may suggest this subtle distinction: play, if followed to its true development, evolves into a game. In the end play imposes a set of rules. It begins to develop into a way of life, which is to say, a myth.
In play we come to experience our whole self through relationship.
We learn to “play” in a serious way that produces something vital and durable. As a result, we are left with a “felt sense of meaning.” The relationship to the psyche matures into a new context. Play becomes a game. Personal meaning becomes a way of life.
The personal myth is the meaning that spans the gap between outer and inner life. It restores the context through which the two are related. Myth is the age-old image for the perception of integration—how the larger world and my life fit together; a pattern in which my life finds its relationship to all its parts. That’s what “meaning” feels like—you know how life fits. Once the meaning is perceived, then each of the separate parts begins to fit together. Each part the myth touches feels alive—multidimensional and multilayered. Soulful imagination begins to penetrate each separate moment. You discover the symbolic life. Outer life feels layered with inner meaning; inner life pushes for outer manifestation.
And that is so because in times like these many people desperately seek a context in which to play. All too often, we are watching other people play. We are literally paying people millions of dollars to play for us. And not just on the baseball diamond. They are playing for us on compact disks; playing for us on videotape; playing for us on the stage, at the concert, on the silver screen. We pay them because they play so well. But perhaps we pay them in exact proportion to our longing to be playing ourselves, which is why they are worth more and more every year. The longing for play is the longing to take the field ourselves, to play with heart and soul as each of us has the potential. We need a lifestyle that creates a context for us to make our own music, rather than always listen; do our own dancing, rather than always watch; perform our own plays, make our own films, write our own stories.
To sum up what Bond is saying here, it’s that play is the serious work of becoming, where imagination shapes our potential into a larger, meaningful sense of Self that emerges from a nurturing and supportive liminal space of being within ourselves.
And if we perceive playing in this larger, more meaningful way than it becomes something integral to our daily lives, just as much as working and learning are. Even more so because of our rapidly changing world around us.
Finally, if it’s not already apparent from reading the quotes above, my own life’s work that I’m sharing here emerged and is still emerging in very much the same way. It is emerging from a lifetime of experiences and knowledge that are integrating together and birthing through playful imagination. And my struggle to articulate it here is part of the process, of figuring out how to play in my own unique way.
Hello.
Welcome to the human race.
We are playing a game.
And we are playing by the following rules.
We want to tell you what the rules are
so that you know your way around.
And when you’ve understood what rules
we’re playing by when you get older,
you may be able to invent better ones.
Alan Watts
