My aged 60-something friend John knows how to play.
When he and my grandkids get together, they spend hours playing card games such as Spit, Hearts, and even Old Maid. The kids scream and laugh, but John is the loudest of them all. When he gets a good hand or wins a game, I can hear him from the next room chuckling like a pirate over a chest of gold doubloons.
He’s also a guy with several hobbies. One that brings him enormous pleasure is watching basketball and volleyball games played by Randolph-Macon College. John never attended this school, yet two or three times each week, you’ll find him courtside either in the school’s gym or at an away game, intently following the games and taking enormous pride in the team.
Even in his work, John demonstrates a sense of play. For the past 12 years, he’s made his money playing the stock market, doing all of his transactions with his phone, calculating trends in the market daily, taking delight when one of his investments pays out, and shrugging off his losses when he guesses wrong. Several times, he’s told me that he’s embarrassed making money this way, an admission that always astounds me.
“Are you kidding me?” I tell him. “Man, you’re like a buccaneer riding the high seas. Lots of people would envy you for what you do.”
From the look he always gives me, I can see he isn’t buying it, in part, I think, because he regards his forays into the market not as work, but as something frivolous.
Child Craft
Most grandparents, I suspect, get a charge out of watching their grandkids play. My little ones construct Lincoln Log towns, populate them with Play-Mobile figures, and carry on imaginative dialogues among these characters that they’ve made. They draw pictures, pretend to be soldiers, kick soccer balls around the yard, and build forts in the woods. The 4-year-old studies picture books like a scholar preparing for a final exam.Seeing them at play is one of the delights of my life.
“Play is the work of a child,” Maria Montessori rightly said.
It’s in play that children practice social skills, develop their imaginations and creativity, and explore and engage the world around them in a myriad of ways.
It’s Good for You
If you Google “the importance of play in adulthood,” scores of sites pop up, many of which offer the same reasons why play is beneficial for grownups. The writers of these articles understand that recreation is “re-creation” and that it takes us away from work and stress, mini-vacations that return us renewed in mind and spirit to the tasks at hand. Playing tennis or chess, painting, or messing around with a musical instrument: such pursuits and others like them relieve stress, release endorphins, improve our brain function, and enhance creativity, research has shown.All well and good. But these aren’t the reasons why children play. They play because what they’re doing is fun.
Just for the Fun of It
I’ve never asked him, but I doubt that John attends women’s volleyball games—he calls the team “his girls”—saying to himself, “Wow, this will boost my mental acuity and probably summon up a whole battalion of endorphins!”No—he goes to these contests for an evening of pleasure and diversion, treating himself to a hot dog, hollering for his team, and riding the waves of victory and defeat.
A lot of people are the same. That guy who gets together with friends every Sunday in the fall to watch the Green Bay Packers and shout at his television set isn’t looking for some sort of cure for his brutal weeks at the office. He’s there for the sheer exuberance of cheering on his beloved Packers.
The 60-something-year-old woman I know who takes deep pleasure in gardening—and believe me, her yard is worthy of a feature article in “Southern Living”—doesn’t go out digging, watering, and weeding day after day thinking, “This will improve my cognitive functions.” No—she’s out there getting dirt under her fingernails because she loves plants and Mother Nature.
One Man’s Play Is Another Man’s Work
My sweet daughter worries about me. She thinks I work too much. In the past three years, she has told me several times, “Take a break from the writing. Do something fun.”Each time, my reply is the same, “This is a lifelong dream, and it’s finally come true.”
And sometimes, I remember to add, “Besides, most of what I write is fun!”
Each of us has our own definition of fun.
Winston Churchill found relief from politics in painting watercolors and, of all things, in laying brick. Ronald Reagan rode horses and enjoyed chopping up firewood. Like Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II in her younger years enjoyed horseback riding, and she’s also an avid philatelist, having compiled a valuable collection of stamps over her lifetime.
Closer to my own life, I knew a retiree, now long deceased, who enjoyed nothing more than retiring in the evenings to his basement to operate an enormous train set he had built there. A young woman here in town takes great pleasure in cooking, including some dishes prepared from recipes she has taken from The Epoch Times’ Home section.
What Gives Us Joy
Over the years, I’ve belonged to several gyms. When my youngest son still lived at home, I would often drive him to the YMCA in Asheville so he could play basketball, and I would dutifully exercise on the various machines and even swim in the pool every once in a while. Those many excursions left me in reasonably good shape back then, but did they bring me joy?Not really.
But once in another gym, I did encounter a highly entertaining exercise machine: an elliptical with a television screen mounted on it. As the rider pedaled and pushed the bars, enemy tanks would appear on that screen, and the bars contained buttons allowing the rider to shoot those tanks. For 30 minutes, I rode my “tank” over hills and through fields, gleefully shooting away at those other tanks without ever noticing the exercise I was getting.
It was a blast.
And that’s my point. It’s wonderful to know that having fun is beneficial, but it’s also wonderful just to have fun.
In “Letters to Malcolm,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
Finding joy and even having fun is also the serious business of life.
