Play and Taking a page from Childhood
To help, we can begin to ask ourselves, individually and from a societal perspective two of the most important questions we can ask ourselves — 1) whether how we spend our time helps us feel good and 2) whether or not how we spend our time is good for us, healthy and enjoyable? These questions are essential to our wellbeing and our responses to them can help us frame and take a closer look at why we spend our time the way we do but also help us question whether how we spend our time increases not only our current sense of wellbeing but also contributes to the future of our wellbeing as well.
Though I don’t have a definitive answer as to why we spend our time in the ways we do from a macro societal level with anywhere near the depth or certitude that life often requires, I do, however, think a clue is offered in the lengths we humans go to in spending time thinking up new and ingenious ways to improve the quality of our experience in our day to day lives. For example, take the invention of fire to cook with, tools made out of metal, wood and plastic, animal domestication, the creation of art, numeracy, literacy, the wheel with counterweights, the clock for keeping track of time, the creation of paper, the printing press, the automobile, electricity, railways, airplanes, antibiotics, refrigeration, the camera, the television and the various other machines and their applications such as computers and the internet. The list goes on and grows larger as our survival on this planet continues simultaneously merged with our obsessive search for the next best gadget and method of securing a better way to spend our time.
To understand what the original intention was for engaging in a particular activity we often have to travel back in time, accompanied by all the psychological problems that mental life tied to memories have to offer, and hit upon the original purpose and design we had in mind for participating in a given experience in the first place. And in doing so, it helps to take a page from our earlier ancestors — our childhoods, in order to better understand and help us think about how we are going about the living we are in the midst of and for what purpose(s)?
If we watch young children engaged in life after we’ve provided them with their basic necessities, such as food, water, clothing, shelter and a healthy dose of love and affection, what we find is children instinctually gravitate towards wanting to play and learn about the world they are engaging with through the navigation of their play. Play for children is their emotional wellspring and life-force and it’s how they process and learn about themselves and how the world operates. Play, and putting their mind towards naturally learning to have fun, helps children move forward with their cognitive, emotional, physical and social developmental needs. As Wang and Aamodt (2012) point out, play activates both the brain’s reward and learning circuitry and thus “helps children learn life skills and to find out what they like”. Thus, play is a precursor to adult life where children learn to adapt to their environment through practicing skills they will need later on in life.
Interestingly, when we — children and adults — engage in play the stress hormone cortisol isn’t released. Long term exposure to stress increases the level of cortisol in our bodies and impairs our ability to learn. As Wang and Aamodt also point out, “It is safe to say that if you find play to be a source of stress, you’re not doing it right.” Freud (1908) was right when he implied that play works best when thought about as a type of release in which a child learns to express their feelings and dispel negatives emotions and replace them with positive ones. Certainly, a worthy endeavor that we adults could take a page from in regards to childhood development, whereby we learn how to consciously dispel our negative emotions and replace them with positive enjoyable ones.
What this hits upon is that we humans have an inborn, biologically driven desire to play, learn and increase our sense of wellbeing through our development and enjoyment of ourselves in the process. And for children they’re driving their biological development through learning about themselves and the world in the act of play. Therefore, play entails an element of learning to enjoy ourselves in regards to what we’re playing with in life but more importantly as we age this ability to play and enjoy ourselves moves towards the developmental task of learning how to enjoy ourselves as we carry out our day to day living.
Take the trains, planes and automobiles we use to help us get from point A to point B. We’ve all come to depend on these inventions but they started off in relation to an inventor having the curiosity to play around with how to move from one physical location to another more efficiently. The inventors were being curious about how something works by putting their minds toward conceiving of new ways of movement and travel that were non-existent previously.
I’d argue these inventors were taking a page from childhood and learning how to create some serious-fun through tinkering with aspects of technology and applying what they learned therein to help themselves move forward in their own lives but simultaneously do so in ways that also helped us move forward as a race. This hits upon the notion that these inventors were using their minds to think about the process of how something works but also doing so in relation to helping us get somewhere easier and more efficiently. Thus, these inventors did what children instinctually learn how to do through the process of combining thought and play. They learned over time how to put their minds and curiosity towards figuring out how something works but also in the process move their development forward. This human ability is rather novel — to use our inborn abilities to create and play around with new ways of engaging with the world, and thus contributes to our development while simultaneously having a little fun in the process.
At this point in our evolution as humans, it’s hard to argue that all this technology and human built gadgets and artifacts that we obsessively play with hasn’t improved our material standard of living. However, a compelling counter argument could also be made that technology, and how we humans continue to create, use and dispose of these artifacts, end up diminishing our health, both physically and mentally, and worse contributes to the waste and destruction of planet earth as we know it.
What I’m highlighting is the intersection between human evolution and how it is that we humans use our minds to engage in thought and play and its application in regards to creating and expanding our wellbeing and how we go about living our lives. In essence, it’s through the application of our inborn ability to play and think about ourselves when used in tandem — think synergy — that allows us, individually and as a species, the possibility of helping ourselves move our human evolution forward in ways that may be difficult but also can be enjoyable depending on how we organize our time. Additionally, it’s through the application of our play and thought as it pertains to ourselves that we can learn to use our abilities to impact the quality of our living for good or for ill.
In this way of thinking, we are playing around with not only our ability to think about how we go about the creation of our wellbeing but also how it is we learn to enjoy ourselves and have fun in the self-creative, self-creation process of the healthy self. This brings us to a design question of living that we all face in our lives. How do we think about and learn to use our cognitive abilities in the design process of creating and taking care of ourselves across time?
- Spend some time thinking about the spaces you inhabit both inside and outside your home. Pick out a space in which you could dedicate some of your time for decompression, relaxation, having some fun and/or exercise based activities that support your wellbeing. Think about how you could design it in a way that fits who you are and your wellbeing needs so that it feels inviting and comfortable so that you’d want to spend time in it. Perhaps, it’s a corner of your living room dedicated to reading books, doing yoga and listening to relaxation music. Maybe it’s an entire room that you currently use for a study and guest bedroom when company comes to visit. You could consider putting a fresh coat of paint on the walls, put up pictures that relax and inspire you, fill it with aromatic smells that help us relax and invigorate us, put in decorative plants, an exercise bike, meditation cushion or couch for napping and reading. Then spend some time everyday in this space you created dedicated to thinking about and exploring how you go about enjoying yourself — in healthy ways!
