Playing: Not just for kids?

I’ve been rereading The Happiness Project for my book club and I’m at the bit where Gretchen is trying to instigate more play in her life.

Playing? As serious, professional, grown up adults? Yep. And we should all be doing more of it in my opinion.

I’ve been thinking about play a lot lately, not least because I still have three weeks of summer holidays left and the kids are starting to get googly eyed with boredom. I want to find things that we all enjoy doing together, not grudgingly dragging them along to the park because I feel that’s what I should enjoy.

Having kids is a great excuse to play but so often it’s the only time adults allow themselves to do it. Grown-ups get so hung up on the idea of value; value for money, value for time. What we spend our precious free time on needs to be valuable, something that needs to be done or at the very least it should be a legitimate recreational activity, and if we actually enjoy it that is just a bonus. But maybe many of us have simply forgotten what we truly enjoy doing.

I said to the man this morning “I’m thinking of giving up my blog. I’m not getting many comments; people aren’t engaging in it, I don’t know if people are enjoying it.” “Hold up,” he said. “You started this blog for YOU, for fun, for an opportunity to write, why are you suddenly getting hung up on other people?” He is right of course. As the months have gone on, and in the process of trying to be a better writer, I had taken the joy out of something I was doing purely for the fun of it. I put a lot of hours into my blog and my grown-up brain was starting to look for some added value, totally forgetting that the value comes in the sheer fun of writing it, if one person reads it and enjoys it, it should be considered a bonus, not a reason to do it. 

The man says that he loved working with cars, until he became a mechanic. That’s probably true for many people and their jobs. But maybe that’s less about not enjoying the work, and more about forgetting why we chose to do something in the first place, because we enjoy it. We’re looking for that value again.

Anyway, back to playing. Watching my kids play totally unconcerned with value inspires me to play myself. They don’t care about getting money or recognition or “getting things done because they need to be”. They don’t even think about it.

As adults many of us play games consoles, do crosswords or Sudoku in our free time. All legitimate play options for adults, they encourage fine motor skills, keep the brains working, some console games could even be considered physical exercise. But one of the things I love is those mosaic sticker books. I haven’t had one since I was a child but recently I have begun to crave the quiet pleasure of neatly sticking little coloured squares into dedicated boxes to create a funky picture. I eventually found one online. My mouse has been hovering over “add to cart” for weeks now, I just can’t seem to justify spending £3 on something that is actually just a “toy” (and not even one for the kids). Why? There is nothing wrong with a 33 year old enjoying sticker mosaics, or colouring in for that matter (as long as it’s with nice pens and on good quality white paper, there is very little fun to be had with broken crayons and scratchy grey paper). What makes Sudoku, crosswords or Xbox any more “legitimate” than mosaic stickers? Why should I care anyway?

If someone had said to me 6 months ago that they were trying to play more I would have said how lucky they were to have time to spend on something so decadent. I think there is a certain amount of martyrdom that comes with being an adult, especially a parent. We all think we should be spending our time ‘working’. Childhood was time for fun, adulthood is time to get serious and stop wasting time.

But playing isn’t wasting time, it’s a serious business. Just ask son number one, he quite often tells me he has to get his playing done, it’s his ‘job’. I’m lucky enough to be working my way into a job that I also consider ‘playing’ and I hope I can retain this sense of fun as my career progresses. In the meantime, my mosaic sticker book has finally found its way into my shopping cart.

“Omnipotent. Oh, you are? I’m Sorry”

In one episode of Friends Ross asks Joey what he would do if he were omnipotent. “Probably kill myself” is Joey’s response, easy misunderstanding to confuse omnipotence with impotence. But I think if I were omnipotent, even though I may not kill myself, I don’t reckon I’d be too happy. Impotence would be a different issue entirely.

So much of life’s pleasure comes from the simple enjoyment of striving for something and getting it. Whether that is having money, a successful career or knitting a blanket for your baby (I started one when son number 2 was a few months old, he is now 2 and I have yet to experience the pleasure of finishing it, but still), I honestly don’t think there would be much pleasure left in life if you could have anything and everything you wanted.

We watched the remake of Arthur the other night (highly recommend if you’re thinking about it) and down on her luck Naomi tries to explain to Arthur the joy of earning success rather than buying it. Arthur has led an incredibly financially privileged life and has never experienced the pride of earning something. He has all the money he could hope for but if it wasn’t for his nanny Hobson, he would have been highly emotionally neglected, and it shows. Money can’t buy happiness, and I’m not sure that power can either.

I recently had a conversation with my friend about what we would do if we won the lottery. We both agreed that winning hundreds of millions of pounds might be fun in the short term but after the initial buzz of buying whatever you wanted wore off what do you do with yourself? What do you do once you’ve given up work, paid off all your (and your families) debts? Wouldn’t life be a bit boring? No, we both agreed, enough to pay off the mortgage, help out friends and family and a bit to charity and we’d we happy.

Aside from having all the money you could dream of, being omnipotent would be far too much responsibility. Having unlimited power to solve all the problems in the world in one fell swoop is quite a hard task if you think about it. Every time I watch the news and wish I wasn’t seeing images of starving children in Africa or wars in the Middle East I wonder, what would I do? I really don’t know. I don’t think I’m clever enough to be omnipotent because I still haven’t come up with an answer. The root cause of all these problems is people, and unless you change people you will never truly change anything. People have the mixed blessing of free will, so they will always do what they want to do despite what I or any other power might do.

The London riots last week have sparked some quite powerful debates about the poverty of some of the people behind them. We are lucky enough to live in one of the most socially mobile nations in the world, if you are unhappy with your lot and are brave and determined you can make that change. Young children are born with the view that anything is possible, and I think it’s sad that most adults grow out of that. Whether or not the cause of the riots was desperation and poverty (yet to be seen in my opinion) no one can deny that some of the most successful people in the Western world came from the most humble or poverty stricken of backgrounds. Just look at Oprah and JK Rowling.

In this country, even if you have the most basic of your needs met you already are omnipotent to an extent. If you’re poor you have the power to make money, if you’re fat you have the power to be thin, if you’re sick many of us are lucky enough to have access to healthcare to get well. What more do we want?

What would you do if you were omnipotent? Would you want to be?