Never Stop Playing

I have been sick for the last couple of days. My body couldn't handle the pressure and stress anymore. Pretty bad experience, however between headaches and fever, I have managed to reflect over the two terms that were artificially set in opposition to each other - play and work (this is what brought me into the state of being unable to work)

The Western culture regards play as unimportant and silly activity that belongs to childhood. Grown-ups have more serious thing to do. Serious things meaning work. Play stands in in opposition to work, which is so wrong. Johan Huinziga said once that play is crucial to our culture.

“Play is simultaneously liberty and inventions, fantasy and discipline. All important cultural manifestations are based upon it. It creates and sustains the spirit of inquiry, respect for rules, and detachment.”

It is impossible to have satisfying life without balancing both - work and play. Too much work without elements of play leads not only to stress and exhaustion but refrain us from development, from being creative in the sense of finding the right solutions. For me the main difference between work and play can be described by R. Kennedy words:

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"

Play means not only asking the WHY NOT questions and challenging status quo, looking further into future and imagining unseen and unimagined. Play means also being together, it means being connected with community. Pure work is just selling your soul to routines, duties and never endless deadliness. Work as such is pointless and deprives us of humanity (I know it sounds very hard). First when you mix it with playfulness it becomes something than can fulfill your needs and give you and others satisfaction.

In spite I am be usual suspect myself at the moment, I have hard time of understanding what drives people into giving up on play and turning your life into constant work, where family and friends are put aside, all matters is your inbox and presentations. The tyranny of being the best, of proving yourself? Even when you sick, you don't stop. You hold desperately onto it and turn into bitter, unproductive but responsible worker, who replied 50 emails just before she died. Wow, it surely opens the door to ...hell.

Never ever drop play ...neither me or any of you out there. Life is to wonderful and precious to turn it into routines and duties.

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."
Barbara Ehrenreich

Tags: work, play, society, culture

Comments

[radio training school]

Very interesting post.

[Charles Frith]

Get well soon Daria.