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Work Is Play
“We live in a culture that celebrates ACTIVITY. We collapse our sense of who we “are” into what we “do” for a living. The performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be, somehow … indispensable, that we matter.”
~ Roshi Joan Halifax (b. 1942), American Zen Buddhist teacher
“As Shiller says, Man is completely human only when he is at play.” — Jung
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — George Bernard Shaw
Sooner or later we grow old physically, whether we play or don’t play. But mentally, creatively and emotionally speaking we can remain young up to the end if we retain the natural playfulness we were born with. I lost a lot of my playfulness when I leapt blindfolded into catastrophe here in my troisieme age, but after adjusting certain basic details of living I’m rediscovering it. I’m persuaded that it’s an essential element of life for anyone, not just me.
I was brought up in a culture that tends to downgrade play, to relegate it to childhood and to wall it off from the adult world of work. I happen to disagree with that viewpoint, possibly because I’m an artist and you can’t create art without play.
