Imaginative Play

Redefining our relationship to the world.

I can think of nothing in my childhood more transformative than the thousands of hours I spent engaged in imaginative play. My summer days were often spent adventuring around the yard from dawn until dusk. This was not only the foundation of my artistic life, but my personal and professional lives as well. The kind of creativity that this developed did not simply teach me that anything is possible, but also the skills to truly live the old adage — “you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.”

Imaginative play is a surprisingly complex developmental tool. The most obvious element is the ability to create a narrative — which can be a constant source of amusement as children ramble from one intricate detail to the next. These stories can seem abstract and absurd to an adult, but the child is actively learning to navigate the relationships between objects, people and actions. Through high-speed trial and error, children are constantly exploring the world around them, either imitating the people and situations they see, or by creating fictional worlds.

But “narrative” is itself a complex idea. When I was 10, I went on a hiking trip with a friend. Along the way, we stumbled across an empty shotgun shell. We were so fascinated by its presence in the state park that we began to construct a story of how it came to be there. Next we found a patch of vinyl, which we quickly determined was a fragment of not just any windbreaker, but that of the man who was shot with the nearby shell. Suddenly, we had made ourselves into detectives, and each piece of debris we found throughout the hike provided the next crucial clue to the unfolding mystery.

While my friend and I appeared to be quietly amusing ourselves on this hike, we were constructing not one, but two complex narratives. The first and obvious was that of the fictional missing hiker. The more interesting narrative, however, is how we had turned ourselves into detectives and proceeded to methodically assess each clue that we found — determining what each thing could be and the context in which it ended up where it was found. In this manner, we both created a fictional world and, in the exploration of it, developed our relationship to that world. This act of changing one’s relationship to the world is, to me, the most profound component of imaginative play.

As children get older, they receive more and more responsibility — bringing them ever closer to adulthood. Responsibility, one could argue, is simply a defined relationship or narrative that you have ascribed to. Whether it is a job, a love interest, or even an apartment, the breadth of possibilities in your life is quickly dwindled down to a single, concrete reality. Without the skill to explore or redefine these things, your relationship to the world becomes static.

I recently turned 30 and as much as any time in my past, I am continuing to explore my relationship to the world and, in so doing, redefining who I am. To paraphrase a popular inspirational adage, “You cannot become who you need to be by remaining who you are.”

Simply put, a lazy person cannot run a marathon merely by training. That lazy person will either keep forcing themselves to go running until they give up, or they will learn to change themselves. They must become the type of person that can run a marathon — a person who is eager to wake up at 5am to go running, a person who can listen to their body and eat the food that they need, a person who can find an inner peace through the steady pace of a long run. Only by changing their relationships to the world — who they are — can they accomplish such a feat.

If we do not allow — in fact, encourage — our children to reinvent themselves day after day, how do we expect them to ever do that as adults?