On Playfulness

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

If the Internet can be believed, Albert Einstein once said “Understanding physics is child's play when compared to understanding child's play.” There’s something to that quote, methinks; whether it was Einstein who first uttered it is probably irrelevant. 

When we’re kids, we don’t stop to consider that something we’ve dreamed up is implausible or impossible. We don’t worry about something being anachronous, or corny, or too time-consuming (who has more free time than a kid?). When we’re kids, we don’t censor our thoughts before we share them with others (just talk to a kid for 10 minutes if you don’t believe me). Kids truly do dance, as the saying goes, like nobody’s watching.

I recently had an experience that was very profound for me, and it came from doing that very thing: dancing, as I might have when I was a 5-year-old, padding about the bumper pool table to the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. 

I was at a retreat, and as part of this retreat, we had a professional dance instructor/choreographer work with us on A) freeing our bodies up to movement, no matter how stiff-hipped we might be, and B) creating a bit of choreography based on lines from a sutta. 

Somewhere between the movement exercises that had me flopping every which way (imagine one of those used-car-lot-inflatables) and creating my own choreography.

In my movement, I was a miner, taking in love in its raw, ore-like form, and transmuting it through myself, and then and filling other people’s mining buckets with it. I found myself feeling a warm sensation of bliss, followed by literal tears of joy. Like, rivulets of the stuff. I’m not sure what got unlocked in me (besides my hips); perhaps some past trauma, or body image issues, or whatever – but what I do know is that I felt safe in this environment, and cared for, and I knew no one would judge me – they were all doing this too, after all. As such, I danced, freely, for the first time since Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours first charted. The dancing, as it was, might not have been Baryshnikovian, but it was true, and authentic, and the ever-present Randy Jackson in my head didn’t have a chance to get a “that’s a ‘no’ for me, dawg” in before I was cutting a rug in front of 30 of my newest and best friends.

That’s a long way around the block to say this: the closer we can get to that inner child within us all (or, perhaps better put, the spirit of that inner child, in our best, most carefree moment, despite or our family situations), the better off we find ourselves, in a creative sense. There are entire industries dedicated to breaking down the conditioning and self-limitations we put on ourselves because we are told (often by our own conditioning) that we should comport ourselves in a certain way, or that a “good” girl does this, or a “responsible” boy does that, and that dancing is for sissies, and exercising is for meatheads, and all the other horsesh*t we ladle onto our psyches as we age. 

I play on an adult baseball team, and the only time it isn’t fun is when we allow the “adult” elements (arguments, ego, money) to overshadow the fact that we’re getting to hit a ball and run around and cover ourselves in mud and dirt and the sweat of good honest exertion. “It’s a kid’s game,” we remind ourselves all the time.

So is life.

TIMOTHY CHARLES DAVIS is an English Professor from Nashville, TN. He has taught all manner of English and Literature/Reading classes, as well as several Journalism/Media classes, and teaches creative writing (and general creativity classes) via Flowering Lotus Meditation Center. His magazine, newspaper and Web credits include pieces for Southern Living, the anthology Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing, Salon.com, Mother Jones, First We Feast, Saveur, Christian Science Monitor, Gastronomica and Oxford American.  He is a Dharmacharya (ordained lay minister of Buddhism) through Heartwood Refuge and Academy in Hendersonville, NC, a multi-lineage lay ordination program lead by the Venerable Dr. Panavatti Karuna, and a member of the Zen Peacemakers Order, where he serves as a mentor/facilitator. © 2024 Timothy Charles Davis