A-Playful-Path_DeKoven-web

Playing together
When it comes to play, playfulness and a playful path; many of the wiser of grown-ups understandably
look to the young for guidance. Children (human and animal) embody everything
playful. Given the chance, the freedom, given a reasonable amount of safety, that’s all
they do is play.
But the young are different. Their minds are different, their bodies are different, their agility,
their abilities to recover from hurt, their readiness to smile, to abandon themselves to
glee and grief, momentarily, and then to go on to the next fun thing. We grown-ups are not
like that. There’s a difference between the kinds of fun children have and what we might
call grown-up fun. Allow me to put it this way:
Kids play because they have to. It’s how they learn the world, how they grow, how they cope.
For kids, play is life. For grown-ups, play is a return to life. For grown-ups, play is ultimately
and essentially a spiritual experience, a renewal. This is what play brings us. This is what we
bring to play.
Using children as mentors can be inspiring, but never more than partially successful in
guiding us back to a playful path. On the other hand, by playing with children - rather
than by just sitting on the sidelines, observing them at play, and musing maturely - we
(adults and children), not only rediscover, but redefine a playful path.
Three minutes of playing with an infant, and we are goo-gooing and peek-a-booing and
joyously abandoning all outward signs of adulthood. Play hide-and-seek with a five-year-old,
and we’re crawling under tables, sneaking into closets, trying as hard as we can to believe that we
can’t see where they’re hiding while the kids are trying just as hard to make sure they’re hiding
where we can see them. Playing with eight-year-olds and suddenly we are lost with them in
debates plumbing the real meaning of fairness and cheating.
And then there are the older children who are plunging so rapidly into adolescence and beyond,
rushing so completely headlong into what they believe to be adulthood, that they are
already less reliable when it comes to modeling playfulness, but perhaps better guides to what
we have grown up into and away from.
Playing with children, playing together, becoming as close to equals as we can without losing
the way back, we are different than we are when playing with our peers. We (children and
adults) are challenged, not by competition or comparison, but by the connection itself. We
commit our selves to a game that is constantly changing and only occasionally reasonable.
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