Play and Creativity
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”
–Friedrich Schiller
My son swept watercolors around the page—a swipe of blue and swirl of red. “I’m making a mountain—no, wait!—a volcano.” I let him make, with no end yet in sight. He narrates the process to me stroke by stroke as colors saturate the once-blank sheet of paper.
The time passes, and piles of pictures pile up. He makes another one and another one. I watch and recall what G. K. Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
I think a lot about play. I spend many days building hobbit holes atop mounds of blankets on the couch. We build our little shire almost everyday, so I can’t help but wonder: What makes children so drawn to play? When did we “grow old,” and is it possible to “exult in monotony”? Why does science find play so interesting?
While we encourage play for children, by the time we are adults, it’s not seen as a major part of our day. Most of us don’t wake up and say, “Today I’m just going to play.” But maybe we should? Or at least maybe we should reconceive what our work means and how play might still be a critical piece of what it means to work well.
We are a goal-oriented culture driven by productivity. The creative life, however, doesn’t distinguish between the two—play and work—quite so easily, treating them as much more integrated. Most people who write about the topic of play and creativity struggle with defining it because we all have unique ways of experiencing it. In Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, authors Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan identify some characteristics of play: “done for its own sake, voluntary, inherent attraction, freedom from time, diminished consciousness of self, improvisational potential, continuation desire.” The main consensus that I’ve found is that play connects to many parts of our lives: It can be part of leisure; part of work; part of creativity.
Like leisure, play offers us freedom from extrinsic motivators. So when children create, they usually want to give their finished work away. They trust and believe that someone will receive their work and see it as “good” and “beautiful.” There’s no goal tied to production or commoditization. There’s not even a real desire for awards or status. It’s a gift. But it still isn’t exactly leisure. It’s more spontaneous and fun. It also isn’t goal-oriented like work, but it engages us to do good work. The “ends” of playing might show up later, but in ways more directly tied to how we think and who we become as opposed to what we produce. Studies have even shown that engineers who played and used their hands as children were better able to think creatively in their later work and problem solving.
It also doesn’t require the routine and habit-forming necessity of creativity because it’s too spontaneous. My husband told me that whenever his soccer team would hit a rut, the coach would have them play a light-hearted game of handball. He loved the spontaneity of it and how it took some of the seriousness of the game away, reminding his team of why they love the sport. Where work brings seriousness and goals, play brings lightness and presence.
So when people fight the idea of play, seeing it as dispensable and unproductive, they might really be fighting the idea that we were made for joy, and play exists as a way to recover it—to reorient ourselves to reality. May this be a reminder to us all to recall how and why we play and discover the joy of exulting in the world again.
Keep playing,
Jody
What I’m Writing //
My article for Catholic Women in Business looks at productivity and the gift of time.
The language of time management reminds me of the language of consumerism: We qualify and negotiate our time based on how it’s been “spent,” “wasted,” and “used”—words that signify control. Seeing time as a gift, however, helps us to become less fearful that we will not spend our time well. As a gift, time is generative.
How well do you resist commodifying time as a scare resource? Do you see it as something to be shared, or do you see time in a more linear way informed by productivity?
What I’m Reading //
This article from Comment magazine by Jessica Hooten Wilson on Dorothy L. Sayers and her theology of work and ordering our “goods” rightly based on Sayers’s essay “Why Work?”:
Sayers’s theology of work should free us from worries over how to change the world or how to ensure our work is ministry. When these concerns overwhelm us, we are likely putting second things first. We are seeking specific outcomes. We measure our success in our work by visible and quantifiable results. However, to be driven by the end product may lead us to the wrong means.
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