Play as Spiritual Practice

I was talking to my friend yesterday about work-play balance.  She is a full-time working mom like me, and we both agreed that 2 day weekends are just not long enough to do (or not do as the case may be) all that we’d like to.

Like my friend and I, if you work regular business hours Monday through Friday in the United States and have children, then you already know the weekends are when you try to squeeze in every activity that just won’t fit during those 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.after work hours during the week.  It’s when you need to get the kids to soccer or baseball depending on the season, get the oil change on the car, do the grocery shopping for the week,  pick up the gift for the next birthday party,  clean the bathtub, empty the litter box, visit your aging parent or relative, and so on and so forth.

But, it’s also the same 48 hours when you want to bring the kids to the park to play on the jungle gym, go to an early morning yoga class, listen to a sermon at church, lay on the couch or in bed and watch whatever show you put to DVR series recording this week,  enjoy the actual process of spending a couple hours to cook a meal that is delicious and balanced (and maybe drink a glass of red while you are making it too), or to talk with your spouse in a more meandering, conversation-like way versus the usual: What? When? Where? type of exchanges.

And that’s what can happen isn’t it? The needs vs. the wants start to shift into adversarial positions like an internal tug of war.  Our lives become an overly simplified duality of work versus play where one is linked with efficiency, responsibility and livelihood, and the other represents quality of life, what matters most and the sustenance of our souls.

I’ve seen this dualistic struggle on a very personal level through the lives of my two grandmothers.  Their names were Ruth and Alice, and both are long gone now. Ruth died at the age of 52 after having 6 children on a very small budget and an often out of work husband.  I’m told though, while Ruth lived, she had this underlying passion for singing, both in a choir at church and in community theater, that never quite got off the ground.  Alice, on the other hand, died at the ripe age of 85, yet she seemed to be a woman with a whole long trail of regrets that came from not living the life she had dreamed of when a young girl at the University of Michigan.

When I look at my grandmothers lives, it seems each woman was greatly challenged with the demands of work-play balance, and each died before ever finding that sweet spot when the two are in concert.

On a more historical level I think the same difficulty is seen in the contrasting of two classic 19^th century figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson versus Amos Bronson Alcott.  Both have fascinating biographies outright, but in contrast, I find the two captivating and illustrative of this very theme.

For to me, Ralph Waldo Emerson is an example of someone who made effort to have a more balanced life including the spiritual, intellectual, familial, andfinancial.   It is said that he would go on speaking tours around the United States and abroad for income, and that was his way of earning money.  However, he also gathered brilliant men and women in his home for hours upon hours of conversation.  He also wrote poetry that never really brought him any fame or money in life. It is also said he spent mindful time with his children giving them his undivided attention.

Amos Bronson Alcott on the other hand, never quite found the balance. A man of the same century, and according to some biographers Emerson believed Alcott to be more brilliant the Emerson himself.  But, quite simply, Alcott just could not get his act together. He dreamed up ideas but could not figure out how to keep his family financially sound at the same time which included the famous author Louisa May Alcott of his 4 daughters. This led Emerson to frequently lend or give money to the Alcott family to help them stay above financial water.  Some biographers say Alcott would sit quietly on the road of Concord, Massachusetts where the all lived and just wait for a passerby to come so that he could strike up a conversation with them about politics or philosophy for fun.  Unfortunately for Alcott, he shifted the pendulum too far to the side of play and too far from the side of sustainable work.  He was unable to achieve the same balance that Emerson appeared to experience in his own life.

For me, unlike Amos Bronson Alcott and my grandmother Alice, I think my difficulty has been with the play part of a more balanced life because, in all honesty, I’m just not very good at it.

Play makes me very uncomfortable, which then makes me feel totally awkward and tense.  Sounds like a lot of fun, right?! 

Work on the other hand (employment, household or task completion of any kind) is quite comfortable for me. I could do it for hours.  I happen to be someone who likes her work and doesn't hate housework, but I don't think that is what makes it more comfortable than play.

I think my discomfort with play is somewhat based on the circumstances of my upbringing and my generally Type A Personality, but it also stems from American culture.  Americans as a group, and I know this is an over-generalization because we are a highly diversified bunch, do not often do activity of any kind that is not outcome, product driven.  Productivity is a highly valued virtue in the United States that unfortunately got tied to our individual sense of self-worth.  Therefore, to engage in play has the potential to jeopardize one's self worth or value. 

This particular nuance of American culture is picked upon in the movie Eat, Pray, Love Starring Julia Roberts.  In the scene when she is sitting with her new group of European pals in the barbershop, 2 Italian gentlemen try to explain to Julia, the sole American in the scene, about “La Dolce Far Niente,” the sweetness of doing nothing, which they clarify is not getting in to our pajamas, drinking beer and watching reality tv all weekend.

Perhaps though, we Americans, and maybe others too, could wrap our brain around making more time for play if we found a sacred quality to it? 

Though there is a small part of me that says by trying to convert play into something sacred, we might just still trying to repackage the same thing (productivity) by using fancy lawyer tricks… And by god, we should not have to do that, right?

But like I’ve said before, those darn should  statements never seemed to have helped anybody.  So, maybe for us, for me, it is more like what Mary Poppins said, we just need “a little sugar to help the medicine go down,” and ironically, in this case, the medicine, the prescription, is play.

Mary Poppins is in fact a terrific example of both work-play balance and leaning in toward play as a spiritual necessity- a need not a want.  If you are not familiar with Mary Poppins, she is the lead character in a set of 20^th century children’s books and a movie of the same name.  The story, that is beloved by many, is one of a nanny who flies in to help a British family who is caught in a crisis between the values of work and play.

Now, I must confess here, I have never read the children’s books that the 1964 Disney movie is based on by P.L. Travers.  So my reference point for the fictional character of Mary Poppins is the film alone- and what a wonderful film it was, all Hollywood and all.

Recently though, I saw the more modern Hollywood movie Saving Mr. Banks which dramatized another piece of the Mary Poppins story, the life of the author herself, P.L. Travers. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to do so and I won’t ruin it for you, but I’ll just say here I love how the theme of work versus play from the 1964 movie made it into this updated 2013 take on the story.  In this movie you see the author herself depicted as a little girl battling out the push and pull of how to spend her time; for instance when she is pulled between  imagining herself as a hen laying eggs  versus doing a chore like setting the table for dinner.  The author’s internal clash is then exacerbated (or perhaps initiated) by the role her conflicted alcoholic father had in this struggle as he, like Alcott, never quite found the balance between work and play.

I think this theme of difficulty trying to balance work and play keeps resurfacing  because the theme  itself is as timeless as human existence itself- and in the United States it is just in Technicolor.

Ever since the hunters and gatherers figured out means to store food for more than 6 hours and protect themselves from wild animals, we human beings have had more time on our hands.  And ever since, the big questions have been: How do we use our time? What is the right way to use our time?  And, does carpe diem mean getting all our work done to be employee of the month or skipping work altogether to go to the beach?

While I was pregnant and nursing my second child I read a book by Karen Maezen Miller called Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood. It is a fantastic book if you haven’t already read it, but she touches on several of these themes of efficiency and responsibility in the context of consciousness of what matters most in parenthood. 

I remember one piece in particular where she wrote about the challenges of trying to hold in our minds that walking a baby for hours while she sleeps, nurses or cries in our arms is as important as emptying and loading the dishwasher. Yet, because the task of holding a baby does not have a concrete way to measure its productivity (a.k.a. usefulness) like a clean plate or cup, it does not seem to hit that task completion reward button in our brains in quite the same way. A point that I found so true.

Of course motherhood conundrum of balance is not quite the same as work-play, but does share some of the same challenges of prioritizing our values.  And Miller makes the suggestion that we consider the day to day activities of motherhood, that can on occasion  feel mundane, as sacred.

The Benedictines have been doing the same for centuries with simple household monastic tasks like washing dishes and mopping the floor.  From my understanding, in this Christian order each monk is assigned work within the monastery that is part of the general upkeep of their home.  However, what’s interesting is the “work” is not thought to be something outside of or less significant than the hours of prayer and meditation that one may also do to cultivate religious devotion and relationship with god. All the activity one does during the day in and outside of the monastery, work or prayer, is intended to be completed in the same vain, in contemplation.

Certainly other groups and spiritual traditions have similar approaches to treating work as sacred.  When I went to an ashram in India in my early twenties, I was first introduced to the idea of sevawhich is considered selfless service and a staple of most short-term or long-term ashram experiences.

But this is still all about work as sacred…What about play? Could play be sacred too?

I once had someone say to me that the opposite of responsible is not irresponsible, it is carefree.  Such a simple statement, but one that made a deep impact on me and all my hard won attachment to what it means to me to be a “good” person (or substitute in any other word here: mother, friend, employee, wife, daughter, therapist, sister, citizen, human being).  And believe you me, I was attached!

So I think the first step is to begin to release (and relieve) ourselves from all these attachments to what it means to be “good.”  This would free us to then consider the possibility of seeing our household chores as sacred, not responsible.   And we could try to see play as carefree and sacred, not superfluous. What would that be like? Would it change the experience? Would it change the way we experience the experience? For myself, I believe it would.

So today, when I get home from another day of important and sacred work at the hospital, I will go home to my family, and spend time between the dinner-making , baths and story time, playing.  Maybe it will be with my children. Maybe it will be after they go to bed.  And I don’t mean the kind of play described in Eat, Pray, Love where the American is in her pajamas, drinking beer and watching reality tv. It will not be that.  But it won’t be for productivity or accomplishment either- there will be no end to justify the means.  Just process. Just play. And it will be sacred to me.

How can you engage in sacred play today?