Play

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have always loved playing with words. Rhyme, rhythm, sound, and sentence structure have always captivated me. I vividly remember sitting on one of our yellow, vinyl-cushioned kitchen chairs, writing poetry at our white and gold-speckled Formica-top table while my mom cooked. Here is one of my many “masterpieces” that I wrote at that very table:

I often amused myself with words, and, when the works of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein burst into my life, I found another wonderful way to spend my time. I would set up all 37 of my stuffed animals in a semi-circle on my bedroom floor — smallest to largest, of course, so that all could see — and animatedly read to them from the writings of my new mentors. Soon I had memorized my favorite poems, and my readings morphed into dramatic interpretations of “Sick” and “Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout” for my furry friends.

A few years later I discovered the world of music and spent hours in my room with my record player — followed by my cassette player — and a pad of paper, repeatedly playing sections of U2, The Police, Depeche Mode, and Michael Jackson, to name a few, and noting every lyric.

Then life got busy, and I forgot; forgot how much all of those wonderfully magical hours spent with words and rhythm and music meant to me. I dismissed their importance in my life because after all I was “only a child” back then and now it was time to move on, become educated, and build a career.

I think we are more attune to who we are when we are children and still somewhat innocent. Well, maybe innocent is not the correct word here because we may have had traumatic experiences occur in our childhood that marred that innocence. Intuitive maybe? That might be the better word, because even though our lives may have been complicated or painful, as children we seem to naturally know — for the most part, of course — what brings us joy and comfort and how to have fun: curling up in a nook with a comfy blanket and our favorite story, creating fanciful fairy houses under the pine tree in the backyard, sorting and resorting piles of colorful beads across the family room floor while softly singing songs. Granted we had the luxury of time back then that we don’t have as we get older. But maybe if we recognized the importance of our childhood passions, we would find the time to rekindle that love or revisit its meaning in some way — to escape from our “real,” adult life even if only for an hour or two (or three or ten) each week.

Children are so gifted at play — it seems to be their natural state — and play artlessly leads to creation: intricate block structures, finger-painted masterpieces, elaborately costumed-dances. In fact, Carl Jung, the preeminent Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, wrote in Collected Works of C. J. Jung that “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves” (123). Perhaps that is why in the The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, one of the first things the reader commits to doing is a weekly artist date; time set-aside to nurturing your inner artist, or, as Julia Cameron refers to it in the book, “your artist child.” “We forget,” she writes, “that the imagination-at-play is at the heart of all good work” (19-20), and that this artist child “can best be enticed to work by treating work as play” (153).

In his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung writes about remembering his own childish play from when he was ten or eleven-years-old, passionately building houses and castles. “To my astonishment,” he says, “this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. ‘Aha,’ I said to myself, ‘There is still life in these things. The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life which I lack . . .’ ” (173-4). He realized that in order to connect with that creativity, he must play “childish games.” So, he spent whole afternoons collecting rocks from the lake near his house and building an intricate village. This playful process helped clarify his thoughts, and he would return to it later in life whenever he “came up against a blank wall.” He writes, “Each such experience proved to be a rite d’entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it” (175).

Perhaps if a highly educated, extremely respected psychologist/psychiatrist used play in his adult life to connect with his creativity, then maybe, just maybe, we can give ourselves permission to look back to our childhood and remember what filled our lives with joy and enthusiasm; what brought excitement to our days and churned our creative ideas.

I would love to hear what playful activities you remember doing when you were a child. Are they things that you still enjoy today? If not, could you/would you want to bring them back into your life once again?

As always, thank you so much for being here.

Photo by Patricia Prudente on Unsplash

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