The Play's The Thing
EPISODE 061: THE PLAY’S THE THING
Somewhere along the way we decided play and work were necessarily different from each other. Maybe it happened without our noticing it on the way to becoming adults, when play became frivolous and work became serious. But what if the opposite of play is actually boredom, or non-play, and our best work was done playfully? What if play is just Flow? Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
If you listened to the last episode of A Beautiful Anarchy and wondered "when did he get so serious?" and "why does everything have to be work, work, work, with this guy?" you're not the only one. I finished episode 60 feeling, not unsettled, but like I'd left a piece of the puzzle sitting on the table, and in the week since then I've been looking at that piece and turning it over in my hands. That missing piece is play, and it's not that I don't think it fits in with the bigger puzzle of discovery and exploration, or with the work needed to uncover new ideas and direction, which are the ideas that started this whole thing, it's that I think it deserves a discussion all it's own.
So the question I've been asking myself is this: what about play? And the more I asked myself that question, looking at the various characteristics of work on one hand and play on the other, the more I had to ask myself if they're really necessarily different things? More specifically, are they opposites, and what does this have to do with living a life of spontaneous but productive everyday creativity?
I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 061 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
Some of my earliest memories begin with me on the floor, deeply in play. In my mind I have vignettes of myself sprawled out on the carpet with crayons and a Star Wars colouring book, or playing with Lego or Meccano which was a lot like Lego but with nuts and bolts and little axels and pulleys that would get lost in the rug for as long as it would take an adult foot to find them.
I could spend hours lost in that play, trying new things, building, tearing apart, and re-building. As I got bigger, I seemed to skip a stage and went straight from the floor to the top of the nearest tree, climbing and occasionally falling out of, anything I could find a way up. Later my attention turned to art and I would spend hours drawing and painting. And as I re-played these memories, and re-told myself the stories of my own childhood play, I kept bumping into something: play was never the opposite of work, if by 'work' we mean that which takes effort and focus. Play was not the opposite of work in the sense that I thought of it as unimportant, either.
As a young adult, learning to juggle and ride unicycles, and get my dexterity around the kind of skill needed to do sleight of hand, I would spend hours at play, truly lost in it. But also, to use the metaphor from the last episode, I was digging. At times digging hard to discover the limits of what I could do, or to find a way of presenting these new skills in unique combinations. I was no less digging at those efforts, no less at work, simply because it was also play.
A funny thing happens as we grow up, though it's not really funny so much as curious, I think. I'm not even remotely the first person to observe that for many of us growing up included a shift from the lightheartedness of play to something more like non-play, what we too often call work. We learn to be less imaginative. We become less speculative in our work, less inclined to risk and ask: "What happens if I do this...?" followed by attempts at doing that thing, and sometimes followed by snapping a piece of the Meccano set or falling out of a tree.
It's not that we were less serious as kids. Watch any child at play and tell me that play isn't serious or important to them, or that they are applying less effort or focus at play than they would at something they considered work, something they didn't find enjoyment or challenge in.
In fact, watch many adults at work and tell me they aren't often holding something back, keeping something in reserve for later. Sometimes we work harder at play, if that makes sense.
I think play and non-play exist on a spectrum. And work is not necessarily non-play. Play has to do with challenge, and exploration. But so, very often, does our most meaningful work.
Play has to be chosen freely. It has to be undertaken without obligation. The freedom to play is also the freedom to not play. Play is expressed as "I get to do this" where non-playful work is often expressed as "I must do this." And yet the work we enjoy, and into which we pour our greatest efforts is also self-chosen. It might not always feel that way, but we always have a choice and play or playfulness must be chosen.
Play is valued for its own sake. It is a means to its own end, at least as much or more than the means to some other end. With play it is preferred that you keep playing, the same is usually true of playful work, though with non-playful work we tend to want to be done with it as soon as possible.
I think when work and play differ it is often a matter of risk and consequence. It's easier to play, or be playful in our work when we aren't worried about the consequences or the permanence of our actions. The contexts in which we do our work have a lot to do with how easy it is to be playful. As kids the worlds of imagination we played in had fewer risks, either real or perceived. Playing as an adult feels harder. It often feels like we've got more to lose and further to fall.
I think play is a mindset and that it is less a question of being able to answer the question, "is this work or is it play?" and more a question of "am I doing, or can I do, this work playfully?"
Work doesn't have to be non-play. Work need not exclude playfulness, self-expression, or the desire to do more of it any more than play needs to exclude effort, or discipline. I think work matters. I think rigour matters. And discipline. And responsibility. But they don't exclude play. In fact, I'd argue that when they do exclude play they take us outside the bounds within which creativity best works. In which case all the hard work in the world isn't likely going to get you to your best art.
Play involves challenge, often by adhering to certain accepted rules. It involves skill, too, because the challenge we face in play, or at least in play that we find stimulating and engaging, demands the full extent of that skill, even stretching it. In doing this, play becomes a catalyst of learning and growth. Play is not the opposite of work, but of boredom. You can work and be bored, but I don't think you can truly play and be bored.
"Play," Einstein said, "is the highest form of research," his way of saying: play is where and how we learn. Carl Jung said "the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct," which is a longer way of saying the same thing Abraham Maslow did when he said “Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.” Of these three great minds–who knew a lot about learning and creativity–none would argue that play must exclude work, or that work must necessarily be non-play.
So the question I'm left asking myself is how do we work playfully? Psychologist Jean Piaget said “If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.” That's well and good but I find myself nodding my head while also saying, "Yes, Jean, but HOW?"
How do we approach our work more playfully? I've got a few ideas I'd like to explore.
The first is this: give yourself more time. When I think about the times my work has moved from being play to being very decidely non-play, one of the big inhibitors of that play has been rush. When I'm in a hurry I'm not thinking about doing something in different ways just to see where they lead. I'm not thinking about discovery; I'm thinking about efficiency, getting the job done and shipped. I'm thinking about quick results rather than what might otherwise have happened along the way if I'd been more playful in getting there. When I rush I don't have time to fail and try again, and so I miss the lessons I might have learned in the so-called failures and the chance to explore different directions, not just the first ideas that come to mind. I think we need to make time to play, or to work playfully. Could it be we're trying to do too much in too little time? Is it time to slow down so you've got some space on the floor to play without pressure? Rush sabotages play and creativity.
As play, or working playfully, is a mindset not a specific task, much of what it takes to engage it more fully is internal, it's in the mind, and nowhere more so than with the need to deal well with our fears. Playful work requires courage. When we fear getting it wrong, we take fewer risks, and are less playful. Play requires an open mind, and our minds are never so closed as when we fear.
One of the characteristics of play is that it is un-self-conscious. But fear of what others think can turn play into non-play very quickly.
We fear the different and the unknown, too, but playfulness begs us to try new things. Non-play wants us just to do what we know works–what's expedient– but being open to new things encourages playfulness. When's the last time you drove to work a different way, took a different path through the grocery store, or ate something truly new and unfamiliar? Why not start now? If we can't be playful with these things, and look at them from a new angle, how will we do it with things that truly matter to us, specifically our art-making?
Another thing I think makes playful work easier is by separating the starting of our work and the messy iterations that work might need at the beginning, from the need to refine it much closer to it being completed. This is the premise of my book Start Ugly, that all our work begins unrefined and that it's usually more fruitful to focus on the process rather than the finished product. There's a role for the messy making of whatever it is we do, and there's a role for the refining of that thing, but they are different roles with their own very distinct place in the process, so when we allow the editor or polisher to change their place in line and start barking orders at the playful maker who is not only allowed to be messy but encouraged to be so, the roles get muddled, no one does their job ad the work stops.
My own work gets done in stages, and the beginning and middle bits must lock the door against the voices that are in charge of the end of the process that want to perfect something that isn't remotely ready for polishing up. My playful messy maker needs time to get his hands dirty, to play with his creativity tools and what-ifs, to break things and figure out how to put them back together. He needs his own space. And so too does the more critically-thinking editor. The polisher. He needs space to shine things up, to bring them as close as we can, not to perfect, but to excellence. Give them both their own space to do their thing, and remind them of where in the process that space must be. This does not mean that the messy-making part of what we do is playful while the other must be non-playful. I'm just talking about different roles, and there's no reason the part of the process concerned with polishing things can't also do it creatively and playfully, as well.
That editor or polisher, by the way, is not the same as the critic, the voice that–all the way through the process–keeps telling you you're doing it wrong, keeps threatening to expose you, keeps cutting you down and trashing the work. That voice is another thing entirely and it has no place in play or playful work. The voice that wants to polish things up before it's time, that's not the same as the voice telling you the work is crap or your efforts a failure. One is a desire for excellence, though its timing is lousy, but the other demands perfection which is unattainable at any point in the process, and applies a paralyzing pressure that kills play. If your playfulness is being sabotaged by perfectionism it's time to re-calibrate the demands you make on yourself, and perhaps to re-design your process with more time to be intentionally messy at the beginning.
As I played with my thoughts for this episode, I dug around to see what others were saying or thinking about working more playfully. Maybe I Googled the wrong words but the number one suggestion, the best of the wisdom in the most popular articles was to put toys on your desk and surround yourself with bright colours and make your work area fun. And hey, if you need a box of lego or a toy shark on your desk to remind you to be more playful then go for it, but that's never worked for me. If I put toys on my desk I won't be doing my work playfully, I'll be playing instead of working. There's probably some value in that, but I think it's worth remembering that play is much more than just acting with a child-like mindset. And as long as we associate play only with childhood and toys we're not bound to think of it as a crucial part of a more mature creativity.
Play has a lot in common with the idea of flow. I'm not sure if play leads to Flow, or if Flow is what play looks like as an adult, but I can't escape the feeling that when I'm in Flow as an adult, I feel what I remember feeling in play as a kid. Both Flow and play require challenge and focus. They are both their own reward but they also both get us to better, stronger, creative work. And while in both Flow and play, you gain a different sense of the passing of time, become less self-conscious, and more open to curiosity, trying new things, and seeing new perspectives.
Flow is where what is merely play and only work come together in something that's more than the sum of its parts. It's not so much that play and work are added to each other, but multiplied by each other. Flow is the answer to the question I started asking at the beginning of this episode, specifically: what about play? Flow is not achieved as easily as making the space in which you work more colourful and creative-looking, though if that helps, go for it. Flow is bigger than that. It is a state of mind arrived at when we give something the kind of attention we did as kids in play: undistracted and completely focused, when we take the time to follow our curiosity and take some risks, un-self-consciously pre-occupied with the process and not only with our expectations for the end product. And perhaps more important of all, when we are challenging ourselves and not working at anything less than the limits of our skills and abilities, and open to taking those even further.
Play is not the opposite of work but a mindset with which we can choose, or not choose, to do our work. Exploration, which is where this all started in episode 60, is the result of playful work; the combination of curiosity and rigour. Play is the space within our work where we find joy in our art-making, free from expectations of perfection, and the accompanying fear of failure. Because the only way you can fail at play is not by taking it too seriously or working too hard but by hedging your bets, and by playing it safe which it turns out, is not play at all.
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Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0