Letters
You’re a Player and That’s Ok.
Don’t you dare stop!
I love your play. Your featherlight heart floats through the wind while gently tethered to the earth. Your body dances and twirls and laughs. You like fart jokes in yoga classes. You wink at your dog.
Your play is infectious. A base to the acid. It balances the scales. Brings that song into harmony, tuning that ornery g string just right.
Your play makes the serious get a little sweaty in the pit, a tad clammy in the palm. And when the bloviations of long-faced men swamp you, you find a way through. You find play. When they punch you in the gut, you boop them on the nose. And bullets disintegrate to butterflies.
These serious people, the ones with power, they hate the energy of play. You know this. Power hates it because it can’t control it. Power must be taken seriously, to get down to business and manage the schedule, snap back to the subject at hand. But your play is like a fly in their ointment, a crack in the foundation of their empires. It threatens all of it. They can’t buy it, they can’t control it, they can only watch it and wish they were a part of it.
When you release your play, watch them slink back to the dark corner of the nightclub, arms crossed, sunglasses on. All they can do is judge. They’ll call you names. Crazy. Unhinged. Frivolous. Disconnected. And in your forties — when you’re in the middle of life — they call it a crisis. A full-blown crisis.
But you’ve never been all that impressed with power and status and all that. You just kind of float around it.
Maybe you hear the argument from within too. I certainly do as I write this. It goes something like this (for me)…
Voice 1: Who’s this fucking guy talking about play? Wouldn’t that be nice? What about the sweat of the brow and all that? You should be hustling. Isn’t that the noble thing?
Voice 2: Of course, but it’s not the only thing.
Voice 1: Well look here, at the end of your life, if you do it right, you know, trust the system, you might get to play a little. A consolation prize. Perhaps a house on a golf course. So get working with that protestant work ethic man! You’ve got a short forty earning years, and then you can go be useless and enjoy yourself for a few more.
Voice 2: I don’t buy that. There’s got to be another way.
Voice 1: Well you should! It’s how the world works. You work hard…THEN you play hard. What are you doing writing stupid internet articles about play anyway? Jesus you’re frivolous.
Voice 2: Am I? Or am I poking at a vulnerability?
But you know different. And I love you for that. You understand that a game can be performed without play, that the energy of play is something wholly separate from the activities we associate with it. Sure, this energy can exist in those things, but it often doesn’t. A romp in the sheets can be a conquest. A golf trip can be a competition. A football game can be tribal warfare. The illusion of play, but that specific energy is far, far away.
This energy of play, it creates freedom, makes elbow space so one can breathe again. It blows the smoke out of the room and strips the emperor naked. You’re so good at this. And it’s more subversive than you might think. We need that child-like energy to spark out of you and infect those around you. I need it too. Maybe I’ll feel you, the unhinged laugh you release as it cascades through time and space and finds me in my home in Arizona, next to my eight rows of corn.
Release the ego! Give your dog a wink for me, I’ll do it too. Put on the puppet and squawk like an idiot. Keep calling the people back to themselves, to the child with the stuffy who splattered paint on the canvas and slammed the bass note keys just to see what it would sound like.
I hope you find an explosion of play this year. And I hope you continue to have the courage to let yourself be a little foolish around others, to invite them into this subversive energy we all so desperately need right now. I know I need it.
