Why Learning to Play Properly May Save Your Life.
Recently, I was clearing out some boxes and I came across two kites I was given for Christmas a few years ago that I’d never used. I wondered why I’d never made time for playing and what could possibly have been more important? How did I forget how to play?
One internet rabbit hole later, I discovered that there are a number of subtle (and not so subtle) processes that marginalise the role of play and playing as we become adults. Think about phrases like “grow up”, “act your age” and the rush to be seen as “mature” that swirls around us as children and young people.
Add in the shift of focus away from carefree, imaginative, playing towards “adulting”: work, sex and relationships, money, mortgages, student debt, bills or Grind Culture as Tricia Hersey puts it.
“Playing” then, rather than being something we embody, something we are, mutates into something we do to release the unrelenting pressure of late-stage capitalism as it continues to squeeze more out of us with less return. If you’ve ever been in a major city on a Friday or Saturday night you can see it all around you as the valve is released: the intoxicated, collapsed bodies or the out of control compulsive behaviours and emotional intensities in the streets. Some writers have called this hyper or turbocapitalism and it takes its toll on us all.
It doesn’t feel like much fun.
(Re)Learning to play then, might be a way of inoculating ourselves against this systemic battering, and a way of enacting the sentiments of philosopher Herbert Marcuse: “Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”
If we can play well, we can live well.
Therapy is a form of play and playing. This may sound incongruous; most people who show up in the therapy room/space are suffering in one way or another, and playing is the furthest thing from their mind. However, it could be argued that one of the reasons a person is suffering is because they’ve forgotten how to play.
I regularly ask the clients I see “how do you play?” or “what do you do for play?” and at first, they will look puzzled. Some clients from kink/fetish/BDSM cultures will encode the word “play” with specific meanings and will be familiar with playing in the play space and answer the question in reference to this. Other clients with young children will encode the word “play” with the activities they do alongside their children. However, a lot of other people I see will just draw a blank, and this gives a clue as to where we need to focus our efforts.
There is clear scientific and evolutionary evidence that play and playing are good for us as a recent article in Time Magazine summarised:
“Play activates the reward centers of the brain, floods the rest of the brain with feel-good chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin and triggers the release of powerful neural growth factors that promote learning and mental flexibility. It causes stress hormones to drop, mood to lift and has an energizing effect.”
Play also engages the Cognitive Control Network of the brain which enhances problem solving and creative thinking capacities. It also goes without saying that if you play more then you enjoy more. This is why recent social activist writing and action has been about increasing joy; Black Joy, Trans Joy, Queer Joy summarised in adrienne maree brown’s wonderful phrase and book “Pleasure Activism” which argues that changing worlds can also be a fun form of play and playing.
If we return to Marcuse again, we can also connect the act of play with the radical imagination: “Imagination is the faculty of transforming the experience of what is into a projection of what could be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and norms.” It’s where the phrase “another world is possible” emerges, in a speculative free play of many possibilities. If this sounds idealistic, then cast your mind back to Lockdown days and how quickly a new world emerged almost overnight when the political and economic institutions willed it into being…
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott is often regarded as the Prince of Play, and wrote in his book “Playing and Reality” that “playing is itself a therapy…” Playing is linked with creativity and enjoyment (or in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, vitality). Without play and playing then, we lack a sense of vitality in our lives. Playing is the process we engage in, the how, and play itself is the form or the what, the idea of play.
When we are playing well, something arises out of the process, we’re “in the zone” or in a state of flow and totally absorbed in what we’re doing. We bring the whole of our personality and Self into the activity and process. This in itself can be very therapeutic as we integrate or discover parts or ourselves, and ways of living, we never knew were there or that we’d forgotten about.
The National Institute for Play offers some great ideas in their article “Making Play Part of Adult Life” to build up your play muscles…
Find your play personality. Collector, Competitor, Creator/Artist, Director, Explorer, Joker, Kinesthete, or Storyteller. Most of us are a blend of different personalities.
Work out how you like to play. Maybe play for you is about attunement to others (think singing in a choir), or more moving the body, playing with objects, occupying imaginative landscapes, playing socially, more rough and tumble, celebratory, ritualistic or working with storytelling or narrative invention.
Try it out! Select an activity that sounds like it might be fun and give it a try. You can play alone or with others. The important thing is that play feels good to you, you don’t have to justify it to anyone else. Once you’ve found what play works for you, remember to do it often.
If you’re interested in engaging with life more playfully, then we might be able to help you here at Rhizome Practice. If we don’t get back to you straight away, it might be because we’re out kite-flying!
