What does it mean to play?
A quote, improvisation, and growing up.
"There is an old Sanskrit word, Lila, which means play.
Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation and destruction and re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos.
Lila, free and deep, is both delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of God.
It also means love.
Lila may be the simplest thing there is-spontaneous, childish, disarming.
But as we grow and experience the complexities of life, it may also be the most difficult and hard won achievement imaginable, and it's coming to fruition is a kind of homecoming to our true selves."
- Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
When we are children, we play. Freely, and occasionally recklessly. It is the way we process and understand the world.
As we age, we stop playing. We don't lose the ability so much as we begin interacting directly with the world - experiencing the largely unfiltered world of adulthood head-on. We put aside the world of imagination and encounter real life.
Once we enter that world of practicality and direct experience, we have little-to-no need for imagination. Our wealth of lived experience helps us navigate and contextualize most everything we come across.
To imagine, to create something from nothing becomes a challenging task.
Imagination becomes an atrophied muscle, a skill lost to childhood.
How then, might we regain the ability to imagine? To play as we did as children?
I think that only by creating intentional opportunities for us to leave behind the shackles of practicality might we begin to play and imagine in that way.
In safe places where we can let go of the insecurities and fears we hold tightly to us as adults.
To play we must act without expectation - resist the urge to predict, to plan, to analyze. Imagination and creativity are sparked by improvisation and play.
Try it by playing a simple game: throw a ball, and let it land. Chase after it - not out of necessity, but out of joy and exuberance. It is a ball, it is unpredictable. It will bounce a hundred different ways, and without some serious mathematical computations, you can't predict what it's going to do.
This is play. Simple, free, and, occasionally, silly.