Our need for joy and delight, post-pandemic
This issue of Reinventing Home explores the role of play as our nation—and the world—emerges from a great pandemic. Our message: After two years in lockdown, we need joy, delight, and a dose of make-believe in order to feel whole again.
America is in the midst of a mental health crisis. We’ve been walloped by a deadly combination of personal grief, overwork, social isolation and economic uncertainty. As a result, adults have been taking more pills for mood control, and are even showing symptoms of premature aging. Youngsters are affected, too, and in the past two years, we’ve also seen a rise in childhood obesity, anxiety and depression, as well as a spike in school drop-out rates.
All our people are need of recreation—a word meaning “to refresh, restore, or renew.”
A host of studies show that play makes us more emotionally resilient, and provides a vaccination against stress, says Stuart Brown, MD, founder of The National Institute for Play. But how exactly does this work?
The human brain is wired to move between “fight, flight, or freeze” and a sense of safety and well-being. In times of extended stress, we get stuck in that uncomfortable groove, to the detriment of our overall health. According to neuroscientist Stephen Porges, play helps us regulate the nervous system, leaving that state of hypervigilance and returning to a place of calm and ease. Playful interactions of any kind—from a game of peekaboo to an afternoon of tennis or hiking with a friend—gives our brains a therapeutic shot of “feel-good chemicals” that promote a trust, sociability, and feelings of general well-being.
Play is just what the doctor ordered after a long period of social isolation and economic chaos. At other times in history, we have relied on this same remedy. After the Black Death in the 1300s, Medieval Europe held a series of masquerades where people adopted alternate identities, flirted with total strangers, and partied until dawn. Following the deadly 1918 flu epidemic, America created the flapper, the Charleston, the gin mills of the Roaring 20’s.
Play can be our salvation in the months ahead, if we approach it properly—not as a form of unbridled hedonism, but as a prescription for rediscovering our pleasure in each other’s company and in the game of life.
First row below, detail of Brueghel, knucklebones and hoops. Second row, skirt twirling, top spinning and blowing bubbles.
The chief value of play, says Stuart Brown, is that it promotes empathy and social bonding. Play teaches us to take care of our teammates, to be gracious in victory, and to calm things down when the game gets out of hand. Without play, we are on our own. When Brown studied homicidal males—the kind of young men who we label “angry loners,” he found they were deprived of play for most of their lives. In short, we need to take our biological need for recreation—and the steady human contact it provides—very seriously.
We know that play is critical to our health and safety but is one kind better for you than another?
While we’ve been stuck at home, many of us have turned to online games and ended up feeling like rats stuck in an endless maze. Experts warn that computer past-times, from dice to cards to fantasy and war games, are mind-numbingly addictive. Locked in a world of your own, you perform a series of repetitive tasks that fail to give you any insights into human character or creativity.
The signs of a good game? You learn new skills, feel a sense of accomplishment and engage face-to-face with another person, developing both empathy and compassion.
According to Dr. Brown, the best kind of play teaches us how to engage with others, and how to manage real-world risks. Every contest from the Olympics to a game of tag or “defend the fort” is a preparation for real life. Racing and climbing—with the attendant risk of falling, says Brown, are key to our psychological development. By pushing our limits, we learn how hard we can push ourselves. It is thrilling to achieve things beyond our wildest expectations—and just as important to learn how to deal with the bumps and bruises we acquire along the way. The problem is that American parents want playgrounds to be litigation-proof and play itself to be “too safe.”
In The Urbanist, Jake Rosen observes, “Though the policies regulating playground safety in (America) are well-intentioned, they have effectively turned playgrounds into homogeneous, sterile environments.” The American low-risk playground is dangerous because play becomes too simplified. Keeping playgrounds engaging is important not only for the development of early motor skills and concentration, Rosen notes, but also for keeping kids outside and active amidst the growing popularity of video games and mobile apps.
If you’re wondering where to start with your own recreation and renewal, you’ll plenty of inspiration in our spring issue of Reinventing Home. Our contributors explore the role of play from athletics to art, gardens to cafes, and building blocks to music lessons.
Phil Cousineau reminds us how the Olympic Games began—to help heal a kingdom ravaged by disease and war. The role of sports, he says, is to remind us that life is about celebration, and that when victory is achieved, it belongs to all of us.
L. John Harris considers the healing (and stimulating effects) of walking, café-going, and coffee drinking. Flanuering, or walking about aimlessly, is a form of play embraced by artists and writers since the 19th century.
Laurie Lisle considers the garden as a place of play and artistic self-expression; she finds spending hours with her hands in the dirt a lively counterpoint to writing.
Ruth Gendler shows how children play with words, and show us why they are natural poets.
From Funk to UFOs explores the role of play in art. The sculptor Robert Arneson thumbs his nose at convention while Karla Knight draws alien spaceships and records messages from another galaxy—creating her own language.
My own essay, Life Lessons, Piano Lessons, explores the value of learning to play an instrument—-and how music helps us tell the story of our lives.
In Childish Things, Sara Evans explores the advantages of Traditional Toys from Lincoln Logs to building blocks.
In The Soul of Toys, we review a new anthology on the meaning of play. On Dolls features Kafka’s letters to a doll, and Baudelaire’s observations on how puppets and toy soldiers come to live.
Two other books consider what we learn from playing with our pets. On Cats, edited by Margaret Atwood, and On Dogs, curated by Tracey Ullman, show how animals have inspired everything from social satire to new scientific discoveries.
Finally, SoulAtPlay invites you to three new workshops—The Role of the Fool in Humor; the Art of Improvisation, and Play in Couples Therapy.
Play has long played a major role in psychotherapy. It’s where we explore our fantasies and discover what we want, and who we really are. “Without…playing with fantasy,” wrote C. G. Jung, “no creative work has ever come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, because of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.”
One last word on play as the laboratory for human relationships. Since the beginning of civilization, we’ve engaged in games of courtship, games of skill, and games of chance. The Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga insists the health of a civilization depends on its ability to play, dream, and imagine. In his classic volume, Homo Ludens, he suggests that playfulness this what makes us human—more so than the ability to make things (homo faber). Huizinga’s most important realization: If we wish to keep our institutions vital and alive, play must be our primary occupation.
Play is the mother of invention—from the tinkerers who fashioned the first wheel to the creators of the Internet.
It’s also the birthplace of culture—from those exquisite bison drawn on the walls of a prehistoric cave, to our first musical instruments (the flute and the lure) to contemporary drama, painting, song and dance.
For centuries, play has had a prominent role in politics, helping us to challenge those in power. Medieval courts had jesters whose job is was to contradict the king. Religious orders recognized the “holy fool” who responded to the voice of god in his own way. At harvest festivals, the serfs drank and danced to their heart’s delight, forgetting about their overlords. And the Renaissance gave us carnival, where social rules were suspended and everyone engaged in a game of “Let’s Pretend.”
The court jester survives today in commentators like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, and the carnival comes alive at public gatherings like Mardi Gras and Burning Man.
As Shakespeare said, the world is but a stage and all of us are merely players. During the pandemic, we were sidelined—and only half-heartedly in the game. But now, as we rebuild our lives, it’s time to recover the spirit of play.
In a time of great transition, play allows us to explore new ideas and try out new roles. And along the way, it can also help us to revive some lost portion of our souls.
—Valerie Andrews, Editor, Reinventing Home
