Play is for life

Becoming lifelong players

Artist and teacher Holly Warren asks if we use the idea of ‘play’ in our work and lives to its full potential.

Childish or childlike?

The idea of play has been researched, investigated, and proposed so much recently. Voices around the world are calling, singing, and shouting the importance of play for lifelong learning.

Have we dressed play with different robes and roles? Have we left it behind and can’t find it in the lost and found box? Have we put it under the mat and walked all over it until we tripped over it and discovered that the trip was metaphorical and one of great loss? Have we put it aside for reasons that now seem futile? Have we closed it in a closet, collecting dust?

At first, we might think of play as being allocated to the early years of life where it fits comfortably in our minds, but then the idea slowly withers into one suggesting ‘childish’ attitudes which are seen as immature and impulsive responses to life.

Shall we try to walk through the ‘ish’? It suggests being immature, not fully developed where developed means working towards fulfilment. But, looking at it with a tilt, let us see it as an improving quality, refining actions which become more complex, intricate, and elaborate quite naturally. You cannot weave a tapestry quickly. Many threads are needed to create it, setting the warp and weft of learning and knowledge.

Is it how we measure time and set the wrong expectations that gives a negative meaning to the word child-ish? What if we dispel the time connotation and think of it as meaning ‘young’ and ‘curious’?

Ish means ‘to some extent’ , ‘having the qualities or characteristics of’, ‘belonging to’ not only for children but for us all.

According to the Oxford Dictionary ‘child-like’ implies having having positive qualities such as the innocence associated with a child. What a different picture. Its synonyms are ‘genuine’, ‘true’, ‘real’ and ‘natural’. Is the ‘like’ part of the word making the difference? Yes. ‘Like’ is a likeable word. It gives us the possibility of choice and freewill.

Play with this word.

Move around it, tip it, rearrange it, practice it.

What does play mean to you? How do you engage with it? How would you like to use it further? Is it helpful? Would you like to rewrite it?

When you play, do you choose something or are you attracted to it? Choice and attraction are very different.

We play every day and very often during the day. We play ‘with’, ‘along’, ‘around’, ‘at’, ‘back’, ‘down’, ‘off’ and ‘up’ . . .

Play has its own innate rules that come with the action of play as the participants design it. Here we learn to take turns from ideation to performance and roles. It is regarded as free but freedom within the game is plotted and measured. There are infinite connections with life and school. Can you see them? It might take some thinking, pondering and research.

According to Isabel Behncke

Play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. It’s where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. Play increases creativity and resilience, and it’s all about the generation of diversity—diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviours, diversity of connections.

For Peter Gray

The drive to play freely is a basic, biological drive. Lack of free play may not kill the physical body, as would lack of air, food, or water, but it kills the spirit and stunts mental growth.

How much do education and work really embrace the idea of ‘play’ and for how long?

Maybe not quite enough as we need to ‘get on’ with life, but through play we can find niches of happiness, comfort blankets of awe and chillout lounges of joy as the orchestra of life plays on and time ticks and nudges us to move.

Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Let’s dance play with our shadows as we walk back into our early years of life and practice through play.

Gray suggests play is

Self-Chosen and Self-Directed
Intrinsically motivated—means are more valued than ends.
Guided by mental rules, but the rules leave room for creativity.
Imaginative.
Conducted in an alert, active, but relatively non-stressed frame of mind.

Practice for life

What if we dressed the word play with LUDIC or ‘showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness’. Could this word thread in the fabric of the concept of play?

Play is practice for life in our early years. Some say that practice makes perfect. Let’s make our early years last longer. Play as an adult can become a menacing activity where we feel inappropriate and inadequate if it mars our adult image. We have stopped practicing to become perfect . . . adults.

Let’s walk through our lives with an attitude of practicing, learning, and sharing knowledge through play. Let’s use ‘ish and ‘like’ differently. Let’s create a new landscape of meaning through wider perspectives that embrace learning without negative or positive connotations.

Play might be difficult to explain, but play is for life.