The Game of Life

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But the benefits of play are not limited to moments of peak performance. We can find satisfaction in subtle, everyday routine as well. In her book, Deep Play (Random House, 1999), Ackerman describes the rapture of standing among a 'vast city-state' of emperor penguins in Antarctica. Yet she also discovers a transcendent, if not quite so exotic, pleasure in bicycling through her neighborhood or gardening in the back yard. Play is infinitely open-ended in its expression; one person’s drudgery can be another’s ecstasy. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (HarperCollins, 1991), Csikszentmihalyi tells the story of a 60-year-old factory worker named Joe who lived on Chicago’s South Side. Joe built railroad cars in a huge hangar. Conditions there were harsh, unprotected as it was from Chicago’s extremes of weather. And Joe, who had only a fourth-grade education, was on the low rung of the factory.

Yet, Csikszentmihalyi notes, Joe was one of the happiest people he had ever met. At work he was exactly where he wanted to be. He had no desire to be a foreman because he only wanted to fix the machinery, which he did better than anyone else. In fact, the word around the plant was that if Joe retired, they might as well close up shop because he kept everything going.

Joe’s passion for fixing things didn’t end at work. At home he had built a rock garden with an underground sprinkler and a lighting system that created rainbows in the mist. In the evenings, Joe and his wife could sit on their porch surrounded by rainbows. He had made of his life one seamless expression of a particular passion—building and fixing things. He was completely absorbed in his interests. In his living and in his working, Csikszentmihalyi concludes, Joe was a man who knew how to play.

Let’s Pretend

I once watched Lillian and her friend Krissy play with dolls and a large wooden doll house. Each of them alternately introduced a theme, such as 'Pretend we’re baking a pie for your brother’s birthday, but he hasn’t come home yet, and I’m the mother and I’m worried.' A few minutes of this scenario would follow, eventually to be punctuated by the two words that signaled time for a change, 'Pretend that . . .' and after some tussle negotiating the details, they’d be off on a new scenario of fun and fantasy.

I was struck by how thoroughly engaged they were—and how I envied them. If, as it is said, children think heaven is being an adult and adults think heaven is being a child, then in that moment their world seemed like heaven to me. The way they played was so natural, so complete.

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