The Primacy of Play

George Leonard

It was late in the afternoon on one of those golden days that grace the end of summer in Northern California. Annie and I had hiked to one of our favorite spots on Mt. Tamalpais, an area marked “wooded knoll” on our trail map. The sky was clear, the air balmy with a gentle, steady breeze that whispered quietly of autumn. We sat on the edge of a small thicket of trees for a while looking some 1500 feet down at the line of breakers tracing the long, gracious curve of Stinson Beach. It was getting late, so we started back to where we had parked our car, about two miles away. The trail took us out over a large area of rounded slopes covered with grasses turned golden by the heat of summer, now burnished to a deeper gold by the setting sun. To the north, the land sloped down from us all the way to the Pacific. To the east, it sloped upward about 500 feet, undulating like the haunches of some enormous living thing. In all this vastness, there was not a human being in sight. Ahead of us, the trail swerved around a small knoll. As we approached the knoll, we were brought to a halt by an amazing sight.

Just in front of the knoll, facing the breeze, were five swallows. Their wings were open but were not moving, nor were the birds themselves moving. The five of them were absolutely motionless, frozen in space. It was as if they were mounted on invisible rods. Very cautiously, we came closer. Still they didn’t move, not even an inch, in relation to the earth. Finally, one of them seemed to slip slightly down and backward. Immediately, beating its wings, it circled around and approached the line of swallows from behind, eased into position, made a few precise corrections, and again became utterly motionless.

It was an aeronautical feat involving an exquisite balance of forces. There in front of the knoll, the air from the breeze was being forced slightly upward so that the birds could be gliding slightly down in relation to the air while remaining at precisely the same height in relation to the earth. But they would also have to maintain the exact speed through the air that would keep them from slipping even a hair fore and aft, and do this without moving their wings. In addition, to keep themselves from drifting right or left, they would have to line themselves up exactly into the wind with an accuracy hard to imagine. Now and then, one or another of them would lose its amazingly precise point of balance, but it would quickly circle around to resume its place.

We stood transfixed, afraid to move. A question from William Blake echoed in my consciousness:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

But what were these swallows really doing? Behavioral biologists will go to any lengths to explain how everything an animal does serves a purpose and that purpose is to enhance its survival and to pass on its genes to the next generation. When lion cubs attack each other with mock cuffs and bites, we all agree that they are playing. The biologists tell us, however, that they play only to prepare themselves for their work as adult predators.

Yes, that’s one way of saying it. But what, if any, is the difference between “work” and “play?” And even if there is a clear difference, what work were the birds on Mt. Tam preparing for? There are certain raptors that hover motionless while searching the ground for prey, but swallows are not hovering birds. They seek insects with swift, darting flight. No insects were coming their way on the breeze. Their beaks never opened.

They were playing.

What are we doing in our dojo? We might have first come to aikido for self-defense or fitness or balance. But after a few months these considerations fade away. We are doing it, with all that it entails—strenuous exertion, pain, close calls, occasional injury, along with years and years of what you might call “hard work”—for the sheer delight of it.

We are playing.

Maximizing The Play

In his inspired, evocative book, Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture, the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga shows how what we call play operates in music and poetry, war and law, ritual and sacrifice, courtship and fashion, art and philosophy—in practically every aspect of life. He argues that other things can be explained in terms of play but that play, being primordial, can’t be explained in terms of other things. Play precedes culture. It extends beyond the rational, beyond abstractions, beyond matter. Play, in short, is irreducible.

Let’s simply say that play is whatever absorbs us fully, whatever creates purpose and order, whatever involves us in as much meaningful interaction as is possible. In our best games, there’s always a certain edge to that interaction, a fine balance between victory and defeat. We like close calls, tight races. In baseball, for example, second base is exactly ninety feet from first base. Were the bases five feet closer together, almost every runner would be able to steal second. Were they five feet farther apart, hardly any runner would make it. We have chosen the precise distance that creates the greatest chance of a close call. When a good base runner makes it to first base, the pulses of all those involved—players, spectators, members of the television audience—quicken. Colors become warmer, more vivid. A delicious suspense heightens all our senses. The player on first base takes off for second. The catcher stands and fires the ball, and time slows down as the runner slides into second only a split second before the ball.

Why are we so fascinated with the exquisite balance of forces, with close calls, near brushes with disaster in our games? Why have we arranged our games to maximize these factors? Perhaps it’s because that’s the way it is and has been since the birth of time and space, a defining characteristic of all existence. Consider what goes on within our own bodies: the fine and sometimes precarious balance between heat and cold, glucose and insulin, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, positive and negative charges across the cell membrane. Note the play involved in the vast armies of immune cells searching out enemies, engaging in epic life-and-death contests; the urgent messages cascading through networks of nerve fibers; oscillations dancing in the brain to create virtual switchboards that last only seconds; neuropeptides swimming through veins and arteries to solace the heart and hearten the gut; red blood cells dying, others being born, two and a-half million of them every second.

“One’s body,” aikido’s founder said again and again, never tiring of the words, “is a miniature universe.” The evolution of the physical universe has involved the same sorts of interactions as those within the body: the almost impossibly delicate balances of forces, close calls, near brushes with disaster. No wonder, then, that our best myths and dramas as well as our best games involve precarious moments of suspense during which all seems lost and then, somehow, against all odds, is saved. Could it be that the universe itself is a vast conspiracy to maximize the play?

If so, how sad it is, as we leave childhood behind, that we are taught in countless explicit and implicit ways to work hard rather than to play joyfully. We are taught to do one thing only to achieve another thing. Study hard so you’ll get good grades. Get good grades so you can get into a good college. Get into a good college so you’ll get a good job. Get a good job and work hard so you can have the good things in life.

By the time you get the “good things,” however, you can barely remember how to play.