When I was about 8, my māma, not unlike many first-generation Asian-American mothers, wanted me to learn an instrument: the piano. Despite my teacher being deeply kind and patient, I'd often hide during lesson time and refuse to practice, upset at my mom for forcing piano upon me. As I got older, I'd behave a little bit more, but I only ever completed a year or so of lessons. The lessons were mostly rigid and typical of classical musical education: Play this piece. Once you've mostly mastered that piece, play this next piece. Learn this technique. Do these scales and warm-ups. Repeat.
Years later, as I started my freshman year of high school, I started improvising on the dusty, untuned piano we had at home by sitting down and playing whatever came to mind. I kept that habit and still improvise to this day, occasionally trying a few pieces written by others and sometimes trying to integrate them into my playing. And while I'm certainly not going to impress a musically trained ear and I rarely venture much outside of one or two genres and keys, improvisation has become the single most important expressive and meditative outlet in my life. It's a place to create something out of thoughts, emotions, stories, objects, to compress and decompress.
Sometimes, while improvising, I’ll imagine stories like a tortoise and a hare, or dancers in synchrony, or opposing forces in an epic battle. Other times, I’m just exploring some note patterns that sound interesting. Regardless, the possibilities (and the fun) never ends.
I wonder if the practice and lessons I was learning from consisted of less structure and more play, piano would have clicked when I was younger.
When my siblings and I were younger, we were artists, storytellers, game developers, and world builders. I think many kids were, in their own ways, in their own worlds.
We'd draw and create our own Yu-gi-oh cards and Pokemon creatures. We built an "Imagination World" and filled it with story arcs from dozens of characters (i.e. stuffed animals and whatever we could find). To anyone older, I'm sure the art, stories, games, and worlds we built were simplistic and shallow. We did name a stuffed turtle Turtle, and many characters were relegated to some stereotypes (turtles were wise; Pikachus were feisty; barbies were beauty-obsessed; G-I-Joes were macho). We'd create a nonsensical political system (a social democracy at times with an occasional fascist coup d'état) with its own currency, and we’d give preferential storyline treatment to our favorite stuffed toys. It was our own Westworld but without the sophistication, sex, and gore.
In this world, we made the rules and the stories, and we made the goals; and nobody told us what to do. Sure, there were biases in our heads and lives we wanted to mimic, from Pokemon to whatever was on Disney Channel or Cartoon Network. But Imagination World was our own creation to fill the void of boredom.
Out in the world, we'd turn checkered tiles into chess boards, make music out of tongue clicks, and create games while waiting in queues.
At some point, we stopped playing. We stopped building, drawing, creating, and we were told, you'll have to get good grades and do X, Y, Z to be successful.
There’s a lot of different life paths to take. One route may be to accumulate more (accolades | wealth | things). One route may be to experience more (stories | places | people). One route may be to live by some (values | doctrine | religion). And there's many more routes and intersections. But in it all, I think we could all use a little bit more play.
We've relegated playtime to video games, board games, and sports, where we're told "hey, you can play now, but follow these rules." We've created less and consumed more.
We're told we're going to work for the X hours of the week of work, so we can enjoy the 168 minus X hours of the rest of the week. Or we cycle between working to live and living to work. We've fallen into our roles and stereotypes and learned how to behave by adhering to the mean.
But what if the next time we had a lofty proposition, we sent it? The next time we saw a climbable tree, we tried to climb it? The next time we saw an abstract art piece, we tried to guess the intent? The next time we weren't sure what to eat, we rolled a die?
What if we wrote and created even if we weren't writers or creators? What if we just verbed any word whenever we wanted?
What if we tried to play when we worked? Tried to explore something different, just to see what would happen? Focused on non-optimal but more-enjoyable or creative parts of our jobs? Tried different job functions, and created quests and adventures out of what we could?
There’s no reason why work, life, and play are distinctly separate concepts, other than our own self-imposed constraints.
I think childhood play reminds us how we can create more out of the mundane. It reminds us that we don't need more than what’s around us, because what we have in the world around us and in our own heads is already enough — if we play just a little bit more. 🙂
