Life Is Short. Summer Is Short. Work Less. Play More.

"Play exists for its own sake.  Play is for the moment; it is not hurried. When we play, we also celebrate holy uselessness.”    --Margaret Guenther, author

The play is the thing.

My Little League baseball career effectively ended in the summer of my 14^th year, when a wild fastball tailed up and then in, and then whacked me on the side of my hard-plastic batter’s helmet. No more fast pitch for me. I just could not lean into the batter’s box anymore. My high school football career ended when coach gave me good news and bad news. The good: I was being groomed to be the varsity quarterback. The bad: I’d have to give up every other out of school activity in order to throw that football.  My church activities, my after-school job, my free time in the summer and on weekends, maybe even family vacations—it would all have to go. No more football for me.

But play, to still play: as I so loved to do as a boy on the diamond, and on the gridiron and in the backyard? That spirit of play has never left me, thank God: the joy I receive when I play.

Play catch with my 11-year old Goddaughter BJ on a warm July night, the “thwack” of the ball on leather gloves a summer symphony. Play and toss a Frisbee back and forth with my Godchild Phenix, both of us stretching and lunging to catch that 175-gram disc. Play and so I hop on my bike and spend hours making circles with the pedals, traveling so many miles along rivers and through mid-western prairies, on busy city streets and silent rural backroads.

When’s the last time that you played, really played? Lost yourself in an activity, not about work, not about obligation, not about winning but just about having fun? Tossed horseshoes in the backyard or steered the tiller as your sailboat cut through bright blue waves or walked with friends on a misty spring morning or swam in the chilly salty ocean?

It’s tempting always to judge play as only for the kids, or only for time wasters, not applicable if the goal is to win the game at all costs.  I partially agree. When play becomes a chore, when play becomes an end to a means and is no longer play for play’s sake, when play doesn’t “count” unless you are competing to defeat the enemy on the field, to me, that is not play. That is work. 

I thought of this demarcation between play and work when I read a story in a local newspaper this week about a suburban Massachusetts young teenage boy who is being “groomed”, in the words of his Dad, to become a professional video game player. Video games! I love video games, loved playing Pac-Man and Asteroids and Missile Command as a teenager. But that’s not the “play” we are talking about.

Instead this kid, pushed hard by Dad, now “plays” video games ten hours a day, seven days a week. He’s dropped out of going to high school with his peers. Never been to a school dance. Never had a summer job. Sits in front of an oversized monitor for most of his waking hours. The family takes no vacations either. It’s all “play”, all the time, which means, of course, it’s not really play. I find that very, very sad, to see a child’s play—or a child’s game or a child’s sport or childhood pastimes--morphed into child labor.

Every kid should be able play. Every adult too, all of us.

Even God gets into the act of play. Take the word creation, add the prefix “re” and you’ve got re-creation, or recreation, or play. The holy hope is that when we play, when we take part in recreation, we are in fact re-created, made again, renewed. We are put more deeply in touch with the bodies that our Creator gave us, bodies made to work, absolutely, but to play as well. We have souls that need to play, to be silly and to laugh, to be alive! I can’t imagine any human life, my life, this life, without the gift of play.

There’s about 75 days left to summer now. Time is short. So, in the words of the charge that parents have been giving to kids since forever, “Go out and play!”  The play is the thing.