How do you define play?

So I’m looking a book called designing your life....there are four central things you need to gauge, health, work, play and love. I’ve got a pretty good handle on what three of the four are but play well I feel I’m weak at play. Sure I might paint from time to time or watch a movie or occasionally go out and take photos of some beautiful nature but even though I have time I’m not really playing that often. When I was first recovering I was constantly engaged in new things, something as simple as an ammonite fossil, the touch the pattern etc might be engaging, I traveled more but I also enjoyed new things all the time without traveling....at some point that atrophied and now I’m a bit rusty. So I need a few ideas. What do you do to play as an adult? You personally....mind you I will steal the best ideas 💡

I define barbell sports and physical activities as my play ground. I also see camping and hiking as games and i see nature also as my playground

I haven’t been camping in many years.....I need to do more of that.....thank you for responding 😀

I would love to go camping and play freezbee

This is a deep philosophical question. It's like art, we know it when we see it. There is no set rules of play so we have to create them. But it's amazing to me that when a person is truly at play time is arrested, people can stave off hunger, and your concentration focuses to maximum level. I think forms of play differ as much as our personality, so one's form of play has to be custom suited. For example, it's a rare person that gets enthusiastic about Plato and David Hume. I could sit in a library all day, but take me outside in nature and I'm bored. All those years of boy scouts never had an effect on me. Many people gain strength being at one with nature though. For me, dusty books and a lager does it, and those encourage me to write which allows me to be creative, which is when i produce art.

Back to the quote now, "Man is never so authentically himself as when at play." Schiller wrote this in his book On the Aesthetic Education of Man where he argues that the aesthetic dimension is the most important dimension. And our chief sort of play is through the productions of art. Take fly fishing for instance. It's almost like a dance that one tries to prune and perfect over time until one is just doing it, feeling it, and it's like riding a bicycle, or mastering a left kick to score a goal. For me, i like to get to the point where im at one with the activity, like my friend who feels he is at one with his guitar, where you get to that master level where you're just doing it. Learning to dance can be difficult but once you've got it down it becomes play.

For me, I've dedicated my life to philosophy, and it took me awhile where I could sit down and understand Plato and Aristotle, David Hume, and Thomas Reid, William James, but once I understoodd them, and I am able to write about them, I then can do my favorite activity called the "free play of ideas" where i slowly construct my own philosophy and myths. Part of my passion is the philosophy of literature too, which is examining each person's literary tools for how they express their ideas. Socrates with his masks of irony, Plato with his fanciful allegories, Wittgenstein with his quirky paragraphs, David Hume with his elegant flow, Thomas Reid with his tangents, Herodotus with his morality tales, Nietzsche with his aphorisms. Human expression interests me and interest is key, it can be tiring, just like playing a sport can be, and I have late hours writing, but, like my friend who feels he's part of his guitar, I feel as though I'm part of my writings.

Play is what you do to be free.

Rousseua wrote a book that might have began the Romantic movement, which countered the Enlightenment. He wrote a book called Reveries of a Solitary Walker. I think of them as meditations that connect the external world of nature into the larger world of one's own human nature. It's about seeing the world differently, not mechanically like the Enlightnement would have us, where everything has a cause, but one where freedom can be expressed. He is just one of the people that critiques the industrial man and how we're losing touch with nature, where we gain so much of our inspiration of art from. The library I go to has windows that might be 40 feet high that give a second story view of nature. I love to sit at a desk by those windows.

Rousseau's time wasn't as given to play as we ourselves are, but I think today some of our forms of play may have become addictions.

Barbell sports? You mean lifting weights? I wish i liked to lift weights. I wish i still did. What do you listen to while you lift?

Last time i went camping was a disaster. I went to my camp site and camped on the right side of the camp marker, where my designated area was. 24 hours later I'm told by a group of foreign men to move, and i'm wondering what in the world is the problem, no way, my tent is already up. At least they had the decency to wait after i had been laid lol. Anyway, i was suppose to camp on the left side of the marker. These assholes wouldn't budge and i was forced to move, so i just said F it, and me and the woman i was with got a hotel room with a Jacuzzi in it across from the camp. So we still went to the beach often, and ate lunches on picnic tables, but we didn't have to put the tent back together.

The marker didn't point whether it was left or right, i just thought we ought to be on the right, like how we write left to right.

Yes, lifting weights; olympic weightlifting and Crossfit. I listen to classical music while working out.
I used to hate weightlifting and running; however I have chosen to force myself to love the things that intimidate me, including weightlifting and running. I see physical training as a form of mental training, a path to self development.

I suck at play. The closest I come is dissolving into laughter with my kids or playing with the dogs. I’m always so focused on what I have to do instead of what I could do. I used to play before all of this happened. I was much more carefree.

Schizoaffective, PTSD, Anxiety

I was with a woman for 10 months and she looked at my passion for philosophy and then started to question if she truly had a passion that was comparable. It was sad to see her so frustrated for awhile searching for one. I didn't find mine until I broke up with a girlfriend of 9 years. Jung said that for a tree to touch the heavens its roots much touch hell. Seneca said something similar when he said to reach for heaven you much touch the depths of hell. If it wasn't for my break up I might still not have reached for philosophy so dramatically.

What DT posted about is called 'flow' in psychology, and I agree that what he said is a form of play.

Einstein said that "creativity is intelligence at play" and I agree with that too.

I 'play' a lot more now than I did before all of this. I was always too busy working and studying before. I did sometimes go out with friends, and in holidays I would read fiction books, but now I do so much more.

I find that practising mindfulness opens up my mind in a way that's conducive to play. I notice shapes and patterns and textures in a more child-like way - I say child-like because I think that children are much better at living in the moment and appreciating the little things than adults are, and you could consider that curiosity and openness to experiences a form of play. I often touch things that I see. For example, the other week, I saw this bush with fuzzy brown branches. It reminded me of deer antlers, which are fuzzy when they are growing and then the blood supply leaves, they harden and the fuzz falls off, and I felt this joy at seeing it and stood there or a few minutes stroking the fuzzy branches and looking at the teeny leaf buds that had just sprouted. Even writing about it, recalling the memory, brings me joy. So I don't see how it couldn't be called play. (I also love p u s s y willow (stupid censor!!) and always stroke that when I see it too!)

But then there's also other stuff like dancing about my flat to music, much to the amusement of my dog; singing; crafting; blowing bubbles (so much fun!) I even consider working on my bullet journal play because it's so much fun to decorate - today I played around with my handwriting and pen colours to write different quotes in there to go with my cherry blossom pictures, etc. Honestly, I think that anything that provides simple enjoyment can be called play.

Happy playing!

*Willow*