What Did You Do to Celebrate International Day of Play?

I was just thinking the other day that here I am, I’ve just purchased a mess of LEGO kits but I’ve been spending every waking hour for the past couple weeks working on my blog (to reduce my server fees!)… except, of course, for taking four-hour breaks over the last three days to watch the Extended Editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy at my local cinema… other than that, what am I doing with my time that I haven’t been working on my long form writing, which is supposed to be the most important thing to me right now… It’s a bit like I’ve lived so long by someone else’s schedule that now that I don’t have to, I still fall back on old habits that don’t allow for play… even the writing, which I truly enjoy doing, has to be cloaked in some version of “work” so that I can maintain some illusion of productivity or living up to my potential or some other antiquated notion of things needed for a life to be considered meaningful. It’s amazing the lengths some of us will go to in order to have some play in our lives, even when our culture calls that wasteful or childish.

It was a revelation to me when I discovered this. I had earned my second bachelor’s degree and was working toward my teaching credential, taking a class in Middle Childhood Development, when I came across the academic definition of play. The gist of the definition was that play is any activity where the participant(s) enjoyment is centered on enjoying the activity, and is not necessarily connected to any conclusion or completion of the activity. As much as we might love winning the game, play sees its value in the ongoing activity, not the conclusion, but conclusions are added on because of culture’s need for closure. But the actual benefit or joy is in the doing, not in the having done.

1970s - dad up a ladder on balcony above garage. — 1970s – dad up a ladder on balcony above garage.

Somehow I immediately thought of my father and all of the weekends we spent slaving in the yard, working on whatever needed to be done in the backyard or front yard, or whatever. Even though he spent his whole week working in landscaping, most of his adult life working at someone else’s behest, he still chose to spend his weekends on his yards and my brother and I were thrown into the mix because we were his sons. And as much as he was always promising mom that he’d be done with whatever project we were doing, it didn’t take a genius to see that there would always be another project to follow and that he was perfectly okay with that. My father didn’t have a hobby that I could discern, he didn’t play golf. His form of play was working in the yard. I was in my thirties before I figured that out. All I knew was that if I never spent another goddam Saturday in the blazing sun pruning trees or mowing lawns that would be perfectly okay by me. But for my dad, those sweaty Saturdays (and Sundays) were his form of play.

Sadly, as he aged he wasn’t able to wrestle fully grown trees or throw together massive patio covers from scrap wood or some job site, and never really adjusted to finding other ways to do the things he loved. I don’t know if we ever got a chance to talk about this, but I’m sure that he was fully committed to the yard work being an essential part of what it means to be an adult that he’d probably scoff at the notion that he was “playing.” It’s too bad that we didn’t have that conversation. But I’m glad that I got a chance to recognize that my dad liked his kind of “playing.”

For my part, after going down to my local community center to vote and doing some grocery shopping, I decided that I needed to work on one of my many LEGO kits, a kit that I drove all over Las Vegas to find (got a tip from a local LEGO store employee that Target is often the best place to find “out of stock” kits…): LEGO 31147 Retro Camera build