Is it time for your second childhood? Maybe it is and you have failed to notice. You’ve been too busy doing the things American adults do best: work, worry–and wonder why.
A vital part of human nature is your spirit of play. You came into the world with
your share. More than likely you used it from the beginning. A game of peekaboo
with an infant shows how early it is in place. Just watch the reaction. How eager and
responsive the child is to engage in playfulness.
Unfortunately, it’s all too common today to associate playing with childhood, not
with adult life. Remember hearing things like this from well meaning teachers and
parents when you were young? “Act your age.” “Stop playing and get to work.”
“When are you going to grow up?” But burn this thought into your consciousness: In
the growing process playfulness is not meant to be left behind. It is to come along
with you, keeping heart and spirit young regardless of your age.
An episode in one “Marvin” comic strip illustrates two ways to view play: One from
the outside in and the other from the inside out. In this strip; the family was at the
beach. Marvin’s father, looking at his son on the sand, said to himself, “Marvin is
playing.”
Marvin, shovel and bucket in hand sitting near a newly dug hole and a pile of sand,
had his own thought. He said to himself, “I’m a pirate digging for buried treasure.”
Play when viewed from the outside in is an activity, but when viewed from the inside
out, it is a way of life with at least two important features. First, Marvin is serious
about what he is doing. To him it is not something frivolous or without purpose.
There is intense concentration in this game of imagination.
The second feature is illustrated in children’s popular game of dress up. They begin
first with the clothing. Then they try on this and then that. As they do they begin to
imagine themselves in various settings. In the course of the game they may go to
work, travel, go out to dinner, go to a fancy ball. The play may move from one thing
to another. But none of these imagined ventures were a precondition for the
playing. These came into the imagination with the act of playing.
In other words, in true play the satisfactions come in the playing itself and not from
realizing or achieving some specific goal.
Play generates a vitality that you cannot find in any other activity. With playfulness
comes enthusiasm, expectancy, spontaneity, imagination, creativity, adventure,
experimentation, discovery. The very attributes one needs to enhance well being
and sustain morale
Desmond Morris, in The Human Zoo, interpreted play activities this way: “One of
childhood’s most precious qualities is the urge to seek and find and test, to invent,
to discover…The child asks new questions; the adult answers old ones; the childlike
adult find answers to the new questions. The child is inventive; the adult is
productive; the childlike adult is inventively productive.”
Are you in need of play? It doesn’t have to remain lost or out of reach. Look to the
ways of your own youth, and let it live in you once more. You’ll never be sorry.
Rediscover your playfulness. Make laughter as common for you as it is for children
on the playgrounds at school.
As a hospital chaplain Cy Eberhart, (now retired) was a firsthand witness to the
entire spectrum of human emotions: personal successes and failures; the deepest
despairs and the great peaks of joy. Two questions remained foremost in his mind:
How was it that some could find inner strengths that brought courage and hope and
others could not? What was to be learned from these experiences that would have a
positive and creative effect for daily, routine living?
His lectures, writings, workshops, book In the Presence of Humor and his living-history
performances of America’s famed humorist
Will Rogers offers some of the
answers.
