Nothing Better

Play

Joy in motion

A cup lifted from a table, with steam thinning above itA plain cup held a few inches above a wooden table, a faint ring on the wood where it sat, and two or three loose lines of steam rising from the cup and thinning to nothing.

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God.

Ecclesiastes 2:24

One moment

Picture an ordinary Saturday. Work in the morning on the thing you had been putting off, and the hard part done by noon. Lunch on a friend's porch, and an hour helping him move a piece of furniture. A late afternoon with the person you are married to, talking about nothing in particular. Friends at dinner, and the table held a long time.

Nobody plans a day like that. It arrives. What you notice the next morning is that all five gifts were in it, and that you have had that same Saturday, hour for hour, and missed all of it, running a meeting in your head that had not happened yet. The ingredients were identical. The presence was not.

Life is vapor. Steam off a cup, breath on a window: real, and impossible to hold. Most people meet that fact with denial or distraction. The writer of Ecclesiastes met it with something nobody expects. He recommended joy.

Play is what he recommended, in a sense the word does not usually carry: a way of being, the posture you take toward life when you have stopped trying to control it. Not rest. Not a game. Joy in motion. The opposite of play is not work; the opposite of play is gripping, and the grip holds nothing anyway. These essays are about the posture, and about the ten forces that ruin it.

Each season: the ten forces that ruin play

Each arrives dressed as a virtue. Most people are run by two or three of them at a time. At the turn of each season, name yours. The first four names come from Kevin Gushiken’s A Theology of Play. The other six are mine.

  1. 1. Seriousness

    There is a kind of seriousness that honors responsibility. Then there is the kind that eats your soul.

  2. 2. Discontentment

    Discontentment stares at what is missing. Play sees what is present.

  3. 3. Resentment

    You cannot play if you are still keeping debts.

  4. 4. Time

    The clock has become a tyrant. We wake up behind.

  5. 5. Religion

    Many believers quietly suspect that joy is unsafe.

  6. 6. Family

    Our earliest environments shape our relationship with joy.

  7. 7. Alone

    Play needs people. Not crowds or noise. People.

  8. 8. Languishing

    Languishing is not dramatic. It is “meh.”

  9. 9. Atrophy

    Play is a muscle. If you do not use it, it weakens.

  10. 10. Control

    Control is the quiet religion of our age. It is also the death of play.

The ten in full, as they stand in the Rule of Play: Why So Serious?

Essays

  • Busy is a hiding place

    The calendar feels like proof you matter. It is mostly proof you have stopped choosing.

  • The two industries

    Denial and distraction are the two biggest businesses in modern life, and they sell the same product: not looking.

  • The hand cramps around steam

    The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is gripping, and the grip holds nothing anyway.

The whole argument, on nine pages: start here.