“Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play.”

― Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian

My mother specialized in early childhood development, which I count as one of my major blessings in life. She has a rare and exceptionally honed ability to communicate with children and to give them what they need to unfold naturally in the maturation process. I recall thinking in my teen years that her approach to children differed from that of other mothers and educators, she seemed to be both more present and more hands off at the same time. She always seemed less concerned about shaping the children into some mould than in creating the space for them to become who they are, more like a gardener who prepares the soil and waters the seeds than a genetic engineer who tinkers with the seed’s natural design other to produce a desired effect.

I’m in the thick of reading John Muir’s “Travels in Alaska” at the moment, while living in and exploring the magical corner of the world now called Southeast Alaska. Muir details the impressions made by this land on his remarkable trips through the region in 1879 and 1880 and in his inimitable way, immerses the reader in his practical, playful worship of its majestic, raw, and untouched splendor. Chapter thirteen is dedicated to the “Alaska Indians,” the Tlingit, who lived in and stewarded this place for many eons prior to the disruptive arrival of Russians, Europeans, and early Americans on their shores. What stood out to me in this chapter and in several other references earlier in the book was the way in which the Tlingit treated and raised their children. Muir noted, “The Thlinkits are fond and indulgent parents. In all my travels I have never heard a cross, fault-finding word, or anything like scolding inflicted on an Indian child, or ever witnessed a single case of shaking, so common in civilized communities. They consider it the want of a son to bear their name and keep it alive the saddest and most deplorable ill-fortune imaginable.” Tlingit children were children of the land. They played and grew and learned with the natural world around them in a loving and supportive community.

My mother treats children like this; she treated my siblings and I like this unfailingly, despite our attempts at pushing every limit we could find. This made more sense when I helped her with a work/school-related project when I started university. My mother is endowed many strengths, but spelling is not one of them, and unfortunately for her autocorrect had not yet been invented. So, she asked me to edit her Master’s thesis on Piaget’s theories about play, particularly ludic play, and I leapt at the opportunity.

I was tasked with focusing on her spelling and grammar, but I quickly lost myself in the content. What I learned was that for most children, play is a constant and defining feature of their childhood experience. I know it was for me (and still is decades later!). Play is a complex topic and the task of defining it is not easy. The many theories expounded on the subject in the past are clear proof that the phenomenon is difficult to understand. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development, reasoned that children progress through a series of distinct phases as they develop their thinking and reasoning abilities. Play, particularly in its various forms, is widely considered a crucial component of this development. Piaget identified types of play that correspond to various stages, with “ludic” often referring to the symbolic or make-believe play seen in the pre-operational stage (2-7 years old). Ludic play was the focus of my mom’s paper.

The pre-contact Tlingit possessed a remarkable cosmology, as did all of the Indigenous peoples around the globe. Their stories, like so many others, are rich in symbolic imagery, blending practicality and cultural guardrails with spirituality and wonderment. I say are because they are still alive, as are their custodians in most cases. It can be hard for our “modern” minds to appreciate the depth, symmetry, and beauty of these myths and memes that sustained a culture in a remarkably challenging environment for millennia. To the modern, reductionistic, materialistic Western mind, the stories seem fantastic, more the product of a childlike imagination than a complex worldview of a wise and interconnected group of human beings who not only survived, but thrived through—with front row seats!—the ravages of the ice age.

Our current attempts at unpacking mankind’s oldest stories are complicated by the frames through which we view the world and human history. We look at the world primarily through lenses of theory and in some cases cultural prejudice, which explains in part why even the most basic questions of human existence—who are we, why we are here and where we are going—elude even our greatest minds. The predominant Western mindset at the moment leans heavily on the theories of incrementalist (as opposed to catastrophic) evolution and on the notion that we slowly evolved from a primitive state to the lofty heights of modern civilization through a combination of chance, survival of the fittest, luck and so on, and the theory of a Golden Age from which we fell and are recovering over the course of recorded human history (which doesn’t go back very far incidentally) has fallen out of favor in recent times. At any rate, the myths and stories of the ancients don’t tend to come very clearly into focus when examined through these frames and lenses. In fact, they are typically dismissed as being childish, ignorant, superstitious, etc., and seen as vestigial playthings of simpler minds. But are they?

My mom taught me that play creates a zone of proximal development in the child.  In play, children typically, if not always behave beyond their average age, above their daily behavior; in play it is as though they were a head taller than themselves. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development. Play is a critical part of the maturation process.

I believe that we don’t play enough anymore, as children, as adults, in school and in the workplace. We’ve forgotten how important it is to our development, to our coexistence, and to our progress as a species. The stories we hold sacred reflect this, or perhaps more bluntly, the fact that nothing is held sacred anymore is evidence of the dearth of play and a primary cause for collective immaturity.

Play connects us to our inner reality, particularly ludic play. Ludic play might be seen when a child goes quiet during playtime, relaxing into its inner world, which might be mistaken for withdrawal or retreat from reality. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. What has become normal, what we perceive as reality (again, through those lenses!) is not natural. We live largely in a construct of unreality where the bulk of humanity, feeling captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried, purposeless living, and restrained from nature’s truths, feels cut off from sensible play and simple happiness.

This decline is compounded by the deepening collapse of the sacred into the secular. Nothing, it seems, is sacred anymore and attempts to restore the sense of sacredness are all too often ham-fisted, draconian, ideological, paternalistic, and doomed to prepare people for a world that no longer exists. Surely there is a way to restore balance and sanity, to rekindle solidarity around the common good without succumbing to the age-old temptation to go down the rabbit hole of resisting evil (which only perpetuates it), and to reactivate our imaginations so that that our inner worlds can be naturally articulated with our outer worlds?

I believe that part of the answer to overcoming the world as it now is can be found in finding ways to promote and nurture play–the kind my mom and many of our oldest societies understood so well–with our children and adults, in schools and the workplace.

Let’s play!