amelia.nashe@gmail.com
amelia.nashe@gmail.com
So. What a difference a month makes when there’s a global pandemic on, eh? Wow. I’m guessing I can speak for everyone when I say the past month has been pretty traumatising. For some more than others, I am sure. I hope you are all well and keeping yourself and those you love safe.
Thanks to the chaos of the past wee while, I haven’t done any prep for writing this post at all. But I figured that regardless of whether I’ve done my homework, it’s actually very important to be reaching out and talking about mental health, creativity and overall wellbeing, now more than ever. This will be especially true for the freelancers amongst you, who may well be stuck at home blinking in shock like a deer in headlights at all the work that’s just vanished before your eyes, anxious about the future. As someone who’s had the first performance of her play indefinitely postponed, and lost a bunch of fantastic opportunities, I feel your pain.
With all this fear and uncertainty around, it can be very easy to slip into cycles of obsessively watching the news, and consequently going around feeling very serious and hyper tense all the time. Trust me, no one understands the urge to do that more than me. Hell, it’s actually my day job to do that in the act of subtitling the news, so I’m contractually obliged! Currently, the only good thing about having a job that forces you to embrace the spiral of anxiety (aside from the fact that I am very lucky to have a job at all in this situation) is that apparently my role has been classed as ‘critical to broadcast services’, which makes my inner child just a little bit smug. Talking of my inner child, I have decided to use this post to write about the concept of play. Something I think we could all do with a bit more of in our lives, especially in these scary times.
The obvious answer lies in the date at the time of posting this. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably have a rare form of amnesia called gullibilipeptia, recently discovered by a scientist who got it by touching the utensils used to make a Big Mac.*
This is actually a topic I always planned to write about here. In fact, when I was trying to come up with a blog name, I wrote down concepts and ideas I knew I wanted to write about, and the idea of the importance of remaining playful in the way we approach life, that Peter Pan-esque ‘never-want-to-grow-up’-ness of creativity, was a big focus.
Hence why I landed on ‘See-Saw’ for the title of this blog. Not only is it, as I have said in previous posts, intended to convey the constant movement and up and down equilibrium of life, as well as referencing the fact that I hope what I discuss here will help people ‘See’ more about themselves than they ‘Saw’ before (I know, groan-worthily cheesy); it’s a nod to the connection to childhood in each and every one of us. Because when was the last time you found a see-saw in your place of work? If the answer for anyone out there is ‘last week’, please do let me know, I would LOVE it if someone has a playground in their office.
Personally, I have always been fascinated with the difference between children and adults, inspired and somewhat scared by the notions evinced in Peter Pan, Chronicles of Narnia, Pan’s Labyrinth and countless other classic tales on the topic. Overwhelmingly, such stories tell of children’s ability to see and do incredible things adults can’t because they are too serious and do not interact with the world in a playful or imaginative way. This is clearly not a new idea. It is something that has permeated our culture (and not just ours, given that Pan’s Labyrinth was made by Mexican filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro) for centuries, possibly millennia.
Our attraction to playing has certainly seeped into our language, through phrases like, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. We seem to dread the lack of it, and equate it with evil, baddies, sadness and, of course, the ultimate crime, being boring. It makes sense that we also tend to link the loss of our playful natures with adulthood. After all, that’s when all the serious, boring, dutiful stuff creeps in, such as work, bills, rent/a mortgage, caring responsibilities, and the dreaded tax return. I mean, who jumps for joy at the prospect of any of those?
It’s a strange person indeed who gets an astronomical electricity bill due to their new homeworking arrangements (this isn’t me, of course!) and says, “What a fun game this is!”
And so, the fear is that as these things fill up our lives more and more as we progress through adulthood, we forget why or how to play and become joyless slaves to duty and responsibility, weighed down by the seriousness of it all. This is why I think now is a good time to remind everyone of the value of play. We are living in a time where things can feel pretty grim, where the consequences of not doing your duty are arguably higher than they have ever been in our lifetimes. But for many of us, that duty basically means sitting on our arses at home doing nothing. So not only do we need a bit of light relief in our lives to get through the next few weeks and months, but for many this lockdown offers a unique opportunity to get creative and rediscover your playful inner child.
But what does it mean to play? If your normal work is fun or creative anyway, where do you draw the line? Sitting down to write a play doesn’t necessarily feel like playing. Or does it? This question takes me back to a typically bizarre Drama module I did during the first year of my BA degree at Exeter. It was called ‘Acting and Not Acting: The Dialectics of Performance’. Sounds incredibly poncy, doesn’t it? I hate to disillusion you, but the truth is it actually involved a bunch of intelligent, minimum AAB grade students spending several hours playing catch or stuck in the mud.
My abiding memory of this module is being told to lead the warm-up for a practical session at 9am whilst horrendously hungover after a Fresher’s party the night before. Note to any budding drama teachers out there: telling a hungover student to “make the star jumps your own!” in an incredibly chirpy voice risks serious injury – or at least, it would do if looks could kill. So on this occasion, what was considered by one person (the drama lecturer) to be a playful activity to unleash our inner creativity, was experienced as a dreaded chore undertaken dutifully and reluctantly by another (yours truly). Proof that this business of defining play is not simple, but more a case of one person’s marmite is another person’s jam.
But as the great tale of Peter Pan shows us, play is more about entering into the spirit of the thing. In the slightly bastardised (but nonetheless brilliant) Hollywood spin-off version of the tale, Hook, the adult Peter Banning (Pan grown up) is unable to fly until he stops fearing the consequences of failure and genuinely connects with the emotions of love, wonder and joy, via memories of simpler, less encumbered times. Once he recaptures these feelings, he is able to enjoy the fun and freedom of flying, and is finally able to play properly with ‘the lost boys’, even using his newfound abilities to be more creative than them in playfighting, and so, win the game.
This beautiful story is meant to reassure us that adults can play, and do it even better than kids can, if they can just get into the right mindset. Once again, it’s all about how you view life.
To go back to the question at the beginning, if you write a play with a sense of playfulness, for the joy and the fun of it, then yes, it is playing. But if you write it stressed out of your mind about your deadline, with a billion other responsibilities and duties clamouring in your mind for attention, you will end up viewing it as a chore, and will probably lose your ability to come at it with true creativity.
Aside from the fact that you won’t enjoy it, just as Peter hates being forced to try to fly before he finds his sense of play, you will be less likely to spend time experimenting and finding new ways of succeeding with your creative endeavour – like Peter improvising some flying moves that ultimately win him the swordfight against Head Lost Boy, Ruffio – if you don’t connect to the joy and simplicity of your inner child.
The above phrase implies something that’s easy, and a little beneath you; perhaps even viewed with contempt. I reckon the meaning of this phrase is very telling. It reveals what we, as a society, think about the nature of playing. And it’s not good. And yes, that’s just one phrase. But words have power. I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t believe that. Also, it is far away from being the only indication of what society thinks of people who make a habit of playing purely for fun. There’s the habitual reaction you face from the vast majority of people when you say that you’re a gamer.
This comes from personal experience, as I spent years being amused by the looks of surprise and the all too predictable reactions of, “I don’t know how you find the time” or “I just never got into that” with a nice dollop of condescension on the side.
Much worse, the closet nerd status of those who play Dungeons and Dragons has all but made them into a secret society. This may be beginning to change, thanks to the huge popularity of Netflix’ Stranger Things, but still the message is clear. Playing for the sake of it is not cool.
It’s alright to fantasise about it in feel-good family films, books and plays such as Peter Pan, but in reality any adult who spends a decent chunk of their time playing games is often seen as a bit of a loser. If Peter Pan was real, he’d probably get diagnosed with some kind of age disorder and ADHD, and be put on meds to calm down his mischievous creativity.
But why such disparity between the real world and fiction? How is it that as adults, we can long for the return to a childlike playfulness in films, but can’t own up to it in the real world? My theory is that it’s jealousy, plain and simple.
Because, global pandemics aside, a huge proportion of us live in a world where we have convinced ourselves the only way to live is to run the rat race of the to-do list harder and faster than everyone around us. And somewhere along the way, it becomes easier to stop trying to make time to do stuff for fun, to play. Amidst the resulting stress, we can very quickly lose touch of what it’s like to approach life in a playful way. The only game in life becomes the competition to earn the right to #WinningAtLife. But really, what’s the point of rattling through the to-do list in record time if you’re not enjoying it?
There’s a fantastic speech at the end of one of my favourite films, the great Richard Curtis’ ‘About Time’, in which – SPOILER ALERT – the protagonist with the ability to travel back in time within his own life finally says he has stopped using time travel to go back and fix things, in favour of this approach to life:
Now, just quoting that film doesn’t do this very powerful dramatic moment justice and I highly recommend you give it a watch, but you take the point. For this character, despite having what is essentially the superpower of having as much time as he likes, his priorities aren’t getting things done perfectly or getting more things done, but savouring every moment of life as it comes. In other words, having fun. Society approval or no, I for one think he could be onto something.
So that’s pretty much it from me for now. I would just like to reiterate that this lockdown, for all its stresses and strains, gives many of us an opportunity to press pause on the rat race of life. It gives you a chance to reflect, to re-evaluate how you run your life in ‘normal’ circumstances, and work out if there is another way to do things. Who knows? Maybe by the time we are finally rid of this disease and life goes back to ‘normal’, the landscape of your life will have changed from a blinkered rat race to a playground of possibilities. Now that may sound a bit grandiose to you, but if you can’t get away with being grandiose now, when can you?
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post (because if you’ve read it purely out of a sense of duty and got this far, let’s face it, you really have missed the point!) and found something in it that’s useful or inspiring to you. Please don’t hesitate to comment below if you have something to say on the topic of play. Given the speed at which everything is moving in the world at the minute, I am considering seriously stepping up my blogging efforts to write and post one per week or every other week, for the next wee while at least, but to be completely honest I haven’t worked out yet if I can make the time to commit to that. I’m pretty certain I’m going to get the next post out considerably earlier than I would have otherwise, though, so please do stay tuned to my Facebook page and social media accounts if you want to catch that. My next post will be about ways you can reconnect with your inner child and live playfully, with ideas specially tailored to a life lived in lockdown. For now, stay safe, stay at home, and stay healthy. Love to you all. Xx
