Deep Play = Total immersion in the waters of authenticity and creativity!
“Play is fundamental to evolution. Without play, humans and many other animals would perish.” – Diane Ackerman
“I sat one summer evening and watched a great blue heron make his descent from the top of the hill into the valley. He came down at a measured, deliberate pace, stately as always, like a dignitary going down a stair. And then, at a point I judged to be midway over the river, without at all varying his wingbeat, he did a backward turn in the air, a loop-the-loop. It could only have been a gesture of pure exuberance, of joy — a speaking of his sense of the evening, the day’s fulfillment, his descent homeward. He made just that one slow turn and then flew on out of sight in the direction of the slew farther down in the bottom. The movement was incredibly beautiful, at once exultant and stately, a benediction on the evening and on the river and on me. It seemed so perfectly to confirm the presence of a free nonhuman joy in the world.”
– Wendell Berry
I was all about deep play as a child. It was vital for me to find meaning. We set up a moldy army tent that my father saved from WWII in the neighbor’s yard when we played a very complex, ongoing game of war. We didn’t think it was a game. We were serious about it. The other side possessed a carbide cannon that I feared because of the loud pop. They shot cherries at us – cherry bombs. I attended to the wounded in my stuffy tent hospital.
We owned a plethora of dress-up clothes donated by neighbors who observed the nature of our creative antics. I don’t remember thinking we were having fun or that it was particularly joyful. To me, it was serious work. We were in the midst of the Cold War. We had nuclear drills at school, diving under our desks and covering our necks with our hands to avoid the glass shard fallout. We had to be prepared!
As an adult, I became a serious anti-nuclear weapons activist. Is this play too?
“For humans, play is a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods, and decrees. Play always has a sacred place – some version of a playground – in which it happens. … Play has a time limit, which may be an intense but fleeting moment, the flexible innings of a baseball game, or the exact span of a psychotherapy session. Sometimes the time limit is prearranged; at other times, it’s only recognizable in retrospect. The world of play favors exuberance, license, abandon. Shenanigans are allowed, strategies can be tried, selves can be revised. In the self-enclosed world of play, there is no hunger. It is its own goal, which it reaches in a richly satisfying way. Play has its own etiquette, rituals, and ceremonies, its own absolute rules.”
“Play ‘creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life, it brings a temporary, limited perfection. The least deviation from it spoils the game.” – Johan Huizinga
“Play requires freedom. One chooses to play. Play’s rules may be enforced, but play is not like life’s other dramas. It happens outside ordinary life, and it requires freedom. Even animals that play instinctively do so because they enjoy play, choose to play when the mood strikes them, or they are invited to by other animals. … Players like to invest in substitute worlds, more advantageous outcomes of events, supplemental versions of reality, other selves. Make believe is at the heart of play and also at the heart of much of what passes for work.”
What Diane Ackerman calls play, I call swimming in the sea of utter creativity. Her book, Deep Play, explores in a visual, visceral way the meaning and essential act of play.
Play requires “daring risk, concentration, the ability to live with uncertainty, a willingness to follow the rules of the game, and a desire for transcendence. They always share the spirit of sacred play, where the child and the poet are at home with the savage. .. The savage is what we sometimes long to be- living by cunning and raw emotion, attuned to nature, sense alert, eluding danger, thrilled by the challenge.”
Then why do we think of play as a silly, inconsequential children’s activity? In my previous post, you’ll recall that an artwork was criticized as looking like a “kindergartener made it.” “We usually think of play as self-indulgent and irresponsible. “Stop playing around, be serious,” someone might demand as if the two clashed. Yet sports are the height of seriousness. Children can be extremely serious about play. Their games, though “fun,” aren’t always silly or filled with laughter.”
Adults may misinterpret play because they’ve lost touch with the seriousness of childhood, their “inner kindergartener.” I was in a therapy group for sexual abuse survivors years ago. The leader liked to have us role-play childhood by sitting on the floor and playing with dolls. We were expected to be silly, laugh, and have fun. I don’t remember being silly, laughing, and having fun as an essential goal in any of my childhood play experiences. My gut said don’t go there. It felt trivializing to me.
When I played house as a kid, it was serious business. My love of baking started there. My disregard for neatness and emphasis on using tools to create something started there. My mother was a professional seamstress and tailor and taught me to sew – what I call soft engineering for women. Exploring what I could make with sewing was serious and stimulating. That was not called play because the adults regarded it as useful. My mother also made a living coloring black and white photographs (yes, youngins, this pre-dated color photographs!). She tried to teach me. Too many rules. Doing it right was exacting. I wouldn’t say I liked it.
“Deep play is the ecstatic form of play. In its thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they’re taken to intense and transcendent heights. Thus, deep play should really be classified by mood, not activity. It testifies to how something happens, not what happened. Games don’t guarantee deep play, but some activities are prone to it: art, religion, risk-taking, and some sports – especially those that take place in relatively remote, silent, and floaty environments.” Deep play invokes the sacred and holy, “sometimes hidden in the most unlikely or humble places. … We spend our lives in pursuit of moments that will allow these altered states to happen.”
Now that we are adults let’s stop seeing play as silly. We play every time we move outside our rote, routine, trained, educated mindset, and start exploring. The creative process is play. Creative expression is play. Worship, retreat, contemplation is play. Play is a state of mind, not a frivolous pastime.
Spend some time and write down ten things you seriously find rewarding. Reread this post. You are playing. You are being creative. It doesn’t always look how you think it should. It’s our serious work to live fully into our being, into this wonderful world we call home.
All references are from Deep Play, by Diane Ackerman, 1999, Random House.
Photo by Fermin Rodriguez Penelas on Unsplash
Related posts:
What’s It Like to be Creative
The Value of Not Knowing What You Are Doing
Stop Judging the Process and Clear the Way for Magic!
