The Discipline of Playfulness
As we come to the end of Black History Month, I hope you’ve enjoyed the previous posts, book recommendations and general discussion surrounding this topic. As someone who is a student of history and other cultures, I can assure you that there will be other posts related to this topic popping up throughout the year, not just in February.
Reading and writing on this broad topic has helped me grow in my understanding. It has also been difficult. Reading the gritty details of mob violence against Black Americans in Phillips Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown or reflecting on the failures of the American church to address the injustices talked about in Cone’s The Cross and The Lynching Tree, it can often feel like humanity’s depravity knows no bounds. There are many other important books written on topics like segregation, mass incarceration, slavery, and the checkered history of race relations in our country. I include a list of a few at the bottom and encourage you to read them.
Perhaps unconventionally, I wanted to end the month by saying a word about exhaustion and sustainability. Many of you are exhausted, whether it be from work, kids, caring for a sick family member, wrestling with others’ (or your own) mental health problems or other important issues. The pandemic has perhaps only increased this sense of exhaustion. We’ve been in sustained isolation and seen the most pathological sides of ourselves come out over the past 12 months.
I also know that many of you hope to take part in making the world a better place, but you sometimes feel burnt out, full of despair and hopelessness. Despite our noble ideals and good intentions, when we engage the world from a place of burn out, it is very difficult to be compassionate.
So how to avoid despair and hopelessness in your life endeavors, whether it be coming to grips with the past, dreaming about the future or struggling with the present? Luckily, I have a very special helper in my life right now, teaching me how to do it: my five-year-old son Abner.
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The differences in how Abner and I approach life begin the moment we wake up. Abner is a force of nature. He shoots out of bed and immediately begins to play. Usually, he’s building with blocks, Legos, or making a race track with his Hot Wheels. He sings and talks to himself, and plays by himself until he can’t take it any longer. He’ll come find me and ask if I want to play too.
If playing were working out, Abner would be an extremely intense personal trainer: constantly blowing a whistle at me, slapping the hot dog out of my mouth, shouting at me to get back on the treadmill.
I’d be the out of shape, unmotivated fitness client who knows it’s good for him, but really doesn’t want to go. My adult brain has so much difficulty playing and has very low stamina for it. Abner could play all day long, going from one activity to another, until he collapses to sleep at the end of the day. Me, on the other hand, I struggle to play for even an hour.
I wake up, roll over, look at my phone (first adult thing of the day) and maybe scan a few emails. Immediately, my mind begins to think of all the tasks for the day – you know, that “stuff I do” that justifies me existing. I take a mental break from thinking about tasks to dwell on my relationships: do people like me? Do I have their approval? Am I appearing as a good person to others or is my inner grossness seeping to the surface? I imagine all the ways I’ll subtly manipulate people today to get them to like me more – all the while being so deluded as to think that’s not what I’m really doing.
Meanwhile, Abner has moved on to Legos.
“Baba come play with me!”
He has seemingly boundless energy, while my fat, out-of-shape inner child struggles to keep up with him. I do like Legos though. We played a lot of Legos during the lockdown. I built castles and cars and Italian villas overlooking scenic lakes that only the uber rich have access to. It was a nice mental escape.
Play can help you get out of your mind for a while. Children use play to work through traumas and difficulties. Without going into details, some of the wildest counseling sessions I’ve had over the past few years were with kids expressing their grief, anger, or hurts through play therapy. Everything they do in these sessions is metaphor and their play is rich in meaning. It is a primal expression for humans who lack the mental and emotional hardware for more precise verbal expression.
Later in life, when we become adults and are able to express ourselves more fully, we tend to downplay the importance of playfulness in our lives. In some sense, we believe we’ve evolved beyond it, that it is a waste of our time. We say empty phrases like “Work hard, play hard”, when in actuality playing just equates to cheap play substitutes like sports and alcohol.
Sports is barely play because it is just an extension of our competitive adult lives, where we mentally sort people into piles of “winners” and “losers”. Alcohol, to its credit, does have the neurochemical effect of reducing the prefrontal activity in the brain, thereby making you impulsive, irrational, and reckless like a child. However, while you may act out like a child or heaven forbid drive your vehicle like a child, intoxication is not true connection with your inner child’s desire to play.
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Playfulness doesn’t cost a lot of money. Earlier this month we played a game called “kick the can” on my block. It’s fairly simple: one person stands in the middle of a circle and tries to tag others while guarding a soda can. Everyone else tries to avoid being tagged and kick the can over. We had more fun that afternoon than most folks would spending hundreds of dollars at the bar. Indeed, play is open and available to all who will give it a try.
But playfulness is being beaten out of us from an early age. We’re made to fit into the overly serious rhythms of post-industrial adult life. As kids what we thought were surprises and wonder, are labeled by adults as distractions and interruptions. I remember the following Bible verse as a kid:
Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far away. – Proverbs 22:15
We had a lot working against us, so as adults playfulness really doesn’t come naturally but takes discipline. You may have heard of the book Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster.[1] In it he talks about different disciplines such as fasting, silence and solitude. I propose an addition to the list, the discipline of playfulness, where we intentionally take time out of our day to have unstructured play time. This doesn’t come naturally to me, but I have a ruthless drill sergeant pushing me to succeed.
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Reflecting on Black History Month, as well as the racial, spiritual, and political issues of our nation and neighborhoods can be difficult and draining. The evil impulses of humanity will never go away, but we’ve got to make strong efforts to leave a better world for subsequent generations. Part of the healing that needs to occur within ourselves and amongst our neighbors requires play.
Whether you’re processing the past or just trying to make it in the present, playfulness is a crucial element to sustaining a healthy mentality. In these overly intense times, we are often taking ourselves too seriously. Though it doesn’t come naturally, perhaps it’d be helpful to take a day off and go kick a can. We could return to the issues of the day with a refreshed soul and increased compassion for others.
REFERENCES
Foster, Richard. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (1978) Harper San Francisco.
BOOK LIST BY TOPIC
History
Baraka, Amidi. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. 2018 Simon & Schuster. New York, NY
Dray, Phillip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. (2003). Modern Library
EJI.org [website]. “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” [link]: https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/lynching-in-america-3d-ed-091620.pdf
Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations : Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal. New York :Ballantine Books, 1993.
Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Kendi, IX. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) Bold Type Books.
Rothstein, Richard. Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
Mass incarceration
Alexander, Michelle,, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised edition / New York: New Press, 2012. Print.
Hinton, Anthony Ray; Hardin, Lara Love. The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row. (2018)
Prison Policy Initiative: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/factsheets/pie2020_allimages.pdf
Cracker crumbs and incarceration: A letter to the locked down. 24 May 2020. https://www.drewfralick.com/writings/cracker-crumbs-and-incarceration-a-letter-to-the-locked-down
Theology
Blount, Brian (editor) et. al True to our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary. (2007) Fortress Press.
Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. (2018)