License to Play
I'm granting it to you. You're welcome.
I feel more at liberty to play on Sundays.
The hillsides that cradle our Austrian town are starting to tinge into pumpkin and rust colors. From the roof terrace, I can hear kids on recess shrieking, a plane overhead, some hammering from a nearby construction site. It’s a weekday as I write this, and weekdays sound more like urban life. A circular saw, traffic, some more hammering.
Sundays here are almost like being on an Alm, an alpine pasture where they look after cows or sheep all summer so they can munch alpine herbs and flowers and produce tasty cheese. After the church bells, it’s quiet enough to hear birds, the occasional clinking of flatware and coffee cups, someone humming in a shower.
Although I lead a quietly countercultural artist/coach life that doesn’t require me to stick to a regular 5-day work week, the acoustic backdrop of hammering, sawing, and traffic noise triggers something reptilian in my brain that says: “Work. Produce. Feel stressed and busy.” Yes, even in this little Austrian mountain town, which is a far cry from Berlin, where I previously lived, and an even more massive slowdown from New York City, where I went to college. Which makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t really be up on those alpine pastures all year round. Not that this city girl has any experience with sheep or cows.
It’s just: why is it so hard to go against the grain? In a recent conversation with another coach, I lamented my lack of courage over ‘coming out’ as a person who is meant to play more than she works. This sounds absurd to me as I write it, and yet it’s probably the truest thing I could say about myself. And what even is this thing I’m referring to as play? I’ve had to define it for myself, because it’s hard to find an adult definition of play that makes any sense to me. In my world, play is an activity or even a state of mind in which I make up the rules, a state that heeds neither clock time nor milestones of accomplishment or productivity. Work, on the other hand, is based on other people’s rules and very much concerned with clock time and milestones.
Play, for me, could be sitting by a mountain stream and piling up rocks. It could be writing a book. It could be cooking up a meal out of what’s left in the fridge. It could be improvising some music.
The tricky thing is that play can insidiously morph into work while I’m not paying attention. The thing I love that can entrance me for hours on end can turn into the thing I am trying to use to win accolades from the world and prove that I am too a useful, clever person.
I recently learned that in China, women can retire at age 55, men at 63. It used to be 50 for women and 60 for men; the change only went into effect this year to adjust for longer life expectancy. My Chinese sister-in-law tells me the age discrepancy between the genders is to account for the fact that women traditionally do a lot of unpaid domestic work. Let me take a moment and say that this is a pretty awesomely progressive stance for a country that gets a lot of flack in the human rights department. Of course, this doesn’t mean Chinese women are sitting around playing mahjong and sipping tea, most of them are raising grandchildren—but at least they’re getting a pension for it rather than going into debt doing more unpaid labor.
I’m not that far from Chinese retirement age and boy, does that sound like an attractive prospect. Not the part about raising grandchildren (not gonna happen), but the idea of being given societal permission to be done with anything that feels like work.
There was a vast stretch of my life, like maybe 25 years or so, in which I forgot about play and prioritized achieving or even—and this is harder to forgive—duty. This is kind of hilarious, because during this time I was also advocating for and facilitating free play in my teaching, but not allowing myself to do it. The reason I’ve always pushed for play in learning is that I believe it’s something deeply human without which we become stupider versions of AI. I believe play is actually the divine at work through us.
Duty, on the other hand, is what I resort to when I’ve given up on the divine, or when I believe it has forsaken me. Duty is the boring older brother of the guy you actually wanted to date. Duty made me acceptable, reliable, and wooden. Where did this sense of duty come from and why have I become such a fervent worshiper of its deities? And even more importantly, when and why did duty take precedence over play?
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Maybe the more pressing question to explore is what happened in the quarter-century in which I did not prioritize play. I had a lot of pains—physical, emotional, phantom. I fretted a lot about things I could not control and which did not improve from all that neurotic attention. I was tired a lot. I took life very seriously and didn’t laugh enough. Okay, it may be an exaggeration to say it was a full 25 years, and that I never prioritized play. There were pockets of play. I wrote two novels that are still hovering in the digital clouds. I started a few dozen projects and finished a handful of them. But it was hard. It was really fucking hard to allow myself the grace of not being a productive member of society. All this creation, all these acts of imagination were carried out more or less in secret, apologetically, as if I were depriving the world of my blood, sweat and tears by not devoting myself unceasingly to the gods of capitalism.
It’s time to wake up and realize that no one is going to grant me an official license to play. I have to write that permission slip myself and forge my mother’s signature the way I used to in high school to play hooky.
