Space to Play

I remember childhood as the slow advance of a great laboring Seriousness. When I was in middle school, an awareness began to settle on me that great beings known as “colleges” watched from afar; by high school I understood that I ought to order my life to be pleasing to them. Nobody was entirely sure what, specifically, we ought to be doing, so orthodoxy was the subject of considerable debate. When such things were discussed, Seriousness draped around our necks like lead aprons.

We need Seriousness, sometimes. Seriousness is what sweeps in after tragedy, bringing rules and regulations, the eyes of good society bearing down upon you. When you’re having a good time and things start to get dangerous, Seriousness rips through the fun like a cold wind through a T-shirt.

But we forget that Seriousness is a means of control, and not a very sophisticated one at that. Wonder and folly alike wither away beneath it. Seriousness is not the same thing as responsibility, though Serious people like to believe it is, and it can only create the desire to flee, not the will to chase. Seriousness is one of the feelings that settles over a competitor before a tournament—the cold understanding that the time has come to execute at the limit of what you are capable of.

But if Seriousness is for operating at your limit, then why would you be anything but Serious? Because Seriousness isn’t enough. A good competitor will have a hunger, too, a desire that Seriousness is too crude to create. That drive will push them to train, to attempt to push beyond their limits, risking failure, to prepare them for the next time they need to be Serious.

Training isn’t that different than being Serious, though. So why would you ever do something very un-Serious, like play?

Play is for fun. Play is to preserve a piece of us that Seriousness does not understand, the feather-light joy of being swept along by life like a seed caught by a breeze. Also, every once in a while, play is for redefining the limit of your abilities entirely, or inventing whole new games.

I am not the only one to lament the smothering gray creep of Seriousness into childhood and, for that matter, adulthood. But I do wonder what becomes of a society that values Seriousness to the extent that we do. Does Seriousness bring out the best in us, as we seem to believe? Or does the immense weight of the future only serve to pin us in place beneath it?

A Serious society assumes there is no feather-light joy, that there are no new games to be found and no new ways to play the old ones. A Serious society believes all it can be is a slightly more optimal version of itself. Students who are Serious won’t take classes that might wreck their GPA, and they grow into adults who won’t look stupid even in front of their friends. We fossilize before we’re even dead.

If the Seriousness weighs heavily enough upon a person, if their life is stable but nothing more and they live in a kind of comfortable unfeeling stupor, there is little that can shake them loose except mortality reminding them of what awaits. Perhaps that is the way to live, squeezed between life and death, shimmying between the two immensities like a climber up a chimney, but if the Reaper himself must show up to get you to attend a pottery class, something has gone horribly wrong.

I played a lot of video games as a kid, and made up games with my friends, and as I got older such things often served as refuges from the Seriousness. I wonder what happens when every shelter from the distant judgmental gazes erodes away. What happens to us when no private spaces remain for us to be unskilled and uninhibited? Do we decide that we are finished with becoming and settle into being? Do we cede the world to belong only to the skilled and the shameless?

Perhaps, without space to play, we do. Perhaps it is already theirs.