When I look through the draft of my book INTROSPECT (it’s not out yet), I find that there are several recurring motifs in my suggestions on how to deal with life’s challenges. And one of the most powerful and important ones is “be playful”.
What does it even mean, to be playful? What is play? It can feel a bit silly to talk about it (but silliness is a very good sign!) – I think because of the arbitrary demarcations we tend to put up in our lives. Consider the very concept of a “playground”, which suggests that play is something that happens in a particular domain – which then implies that it doesn’t, can’t, or shouldn’t happen outside of it.
One of my most popular and well-attended ii salons was about unlearning coercion, and I believe a sticky tagline I used was “does your inner life feel more like a playground, or a prison?” That phrasing seemed to really resonate with people. Because we remember, when we were children, life itself seemed like a playground. And if you’re not careful, as you age, it starts to feel more and more like a prison. Because of all the obligations we inherit, sure, and because of the messaging from society, and from our own families and peers, and worst of all, from ourselves.
I believe it’s possible to reverse this. To dismantle a lot of the prison-like elements of our thinking, and to rediscover, reignite the playful spirit that is our divine birthright.
There’s a great Maurice Sendak quote (he’s the author of Where The Wild Things Are) where he said “children do live in fantasy and reality, they move back and forth very easily in a way that we no longer remember how to do”. I think there’s a clue in there about the spirit of playfulness. It’s very much tied up in imagination. A child can sit in a cardboard box and imagine she’s in a castle. This might seem trivial, but we live in a world that is built by imagination. Nations had to be imagined before they existed. Money had to be imagined before it existed. And if you’re not actively making the effort to exercise your imagination, you are almost definitely in the thralls of somebody else’s imaginings, and you might not even realize it. Consider the phrase “The American Dream”. What is that? It’s a fantasy! Humans need fantasy to function, and yet we hardly seem to give it the respect that it deserves. We continue to uphold the odd demarcation. We love our favorite movies and songs and so on, but we continue to pretend, it seems, that they are to be contained within a fenced up playground.
In the book Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse makes a distinction between… well, finite and infinite games. Finite players play within the boundaries of existing games, and they can take them very, very seriously. They might not even think of it as a game. Infinite players play with boundaries, which requires not taking boundaries too seriously.
Doing this skilfully requires an understanding of social reality, of other people. Because what is a trivial, silly or arbitrary boundary to you, might be something of importance to someone else. “I don’t take boundaries seriously” could be the utterance of an esteemed artist, or of an absolutely villainous sociopath. And the inability to tell the difference is something that I think holds us back from really flourishing as a species.
So the challenge for the adult artist, creative, playful spirit, is to learn to distinguish between important boundaries that should be respected, and arbitrary ones that can be disregarded.
Back to Carse – he elaborates that (I paraphrase from my notes) “to be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. Rather, when we are playful, we relate to each other as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise. Seriousness = pressing for a specific conclusion.”
Which brings me back to one of my favorite talking points: do you allow the universe to surprise you? Do you allow your friends and family to surprise you? Do you allow you to surprise yourself?
Because a lot of people don’t! Because surprises can sometimes be unpleasant, sometimes be scary, anxiety-inducing. But the absence of surprise is a kind of imprisonment. It’s a kind of death. We put up walls to protect ourselves from unpleasant and unwanted surprises, but the fortress we build can also end up being a prison.
There are no universal rules here. Everybody has different needs, everybody has had different experiences, different tolerances, different risk-appetites, different levels of surprise they want in their life. I don’t want to insist that anybody else must become more playful – if you think about it for a second, that insistence is itself not playful-spirited. I do believe that good players are respectful of others, and don’t press for a specific conclusion. We can invite people to be more playful, we can invite people to consider if they’d like to change anything. But if they say no, we can and must respect that. We cannot bully or coerce people into becoming more playful, because all we would be teaching them is that bullying and coercion is how you get things done.
So, how do you become more playful? I believe it’s possible to do it instantly, immediately, in a moment, by shifting the way you choose to think about things. You don’t necessarily have to restructure your entire life to go from being a desk-bound corporate drone to becoming some kind of fire-breathing acrobat overnight – (and you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some fire-breathing acrobats who feel just as trapped in their lives as some office workers do!). It’s less about What you’re doing, and more about How and Why you’re doing it. Of course, I do expect that when you start caring about the how and why, you may find that you start drifting with regards to the What. Still, the question to ask is, what would be surprising? How can you deviate from the script a little bit? Is there anybody you’ve been meaning to talk to that you haven’t? Have you considered watching a movie or listening to an album that’s not familiar to you? One of my favorite trivial ways to become more playful is to try some new candy that I’ve never tried before.
Once you’ve deviated from the script a little bit, it becomes easier to deviate further, and to try weirder and stranger things. Life can be an adventure, even right where you are, if you have a playful spirit. And I believe you already have it in you. You just maybe haven’t communed with it in a while. But it’s always there, waiting patiently.