Never forget the value of play.
I wrote that one day when I was walking around the hospital. It was so profound to me at the moment that I stopped in the hallway and wrote it down as a note. Later I would open it up and just look at it because it meant a lot to me.
David was on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). The year was 1985. I was the president of the local IVCF chapter and David’s job was to be my mentor. For those of you who don’t know, IVCF was started by students and is student run. If there is someone who comes on staff their job is not to lead. Instead they are to mentor and support and develop the leadership skills of the students. I was going to have a mentor.
I was excited to have someone like him. What would a mentor do?
Would he peer deeply into my soul and challenge me? Would he shake me up and point out my weaknesses? Would he give me challenging assignments? When we met, I was ready to go! I had my notebook open and my pen ready.
What he did was indeed profound.
He got up from our table in the student café and walked me over to play video games.
We played “Centipede”. I was ok at it. Not great. But it was good. It was really good.
David was wise. He was wise enough to diagnose my need. I was too intense. I was so focused and driven that I didn’t need a psychoanalysis or deep reconstruction of my personality. I didn’t need more stress or drive to do things. I needed to “chill out”. I neededto play Centipede.
I see it even now in the medical students or pre-med college students who come to shadow me. They have this intense driven personality. I laugh because I see a younger me in them. They hang on every word looking for opportunities to excel.
But what they often need to learn is to be human. How to be present. How to just be.
It is a lesson I have had to learn over and over again through life. I am so thankful for the wise and profound people that have been put in my life to teach me the lessons.
My college roommate John taught me. We played hours of ping pong. He also taught me by example when he and his future (pre-med) wife almost broke up. She wanted “quality time.” John was happy just being with her. Or just being. He didn’t need intense wonderful discussions. He was happy to just sit beside her or walk beside her. Sometimes not even saying anything.
I did break up with my wife Sarah (while we were dating) over this. I would drive her crazy in my drive to score a 100%/A+ on our relationship. She did me a kindness by breaking up with me. I was driving her crazy. I was literally making her ill by my approach to our friendship. And I wasn’t learning the lesson.
We only started dating again when I learned it was ok to just be human. When I wrote letters, I didn’t have to figure out all of the human condition, each of our personalities and our lifelong destinies.
I could just tell her about what I had for lunch. Or what I did the night before. Oddly, she liked me more when I underperformed on these letters. She didn’t grade them and send them back to me marked up in red ink. I didn’t think they were very good performances. I was just being a normal person. She liked me more when I did that.
However, I messed it all up again. We got back together and started dating again. And I figured I had better “up my game.” I started all the intense analysis again. Oops. She didn’t like that. I could tell. I went for a 3-mile run. By the end I figured out that I had better call her and apologize. She later told me that she had decided she was absolutely finished with me until I made that call. It saved our relationship and the rest is the marriage that I cherish now.
What is the lesson?
It is ok to just be human.
It is ok to just be.
It is ok.
Sometimes the best mentoring that you can do is to make someone go play a video game. Or play ping pong. Or go for a walk but not talk. Or just sit beside them.
Thank you, David! And John. And of course, Sarah. Every time I see a Centipede game, I think about you – David – and the profound lesson you taught me. The value of play.
It is ok to just be human.
It is ok to just be.
It is ok.
10 replies on “Never Forget the Value of Play”
Wow, needed this. I think many of us suffer from this “seriousness” symptoms and we think that is how life is supposed to be. I think maybe I need to try Centipede!
Thanks for your reply. I think we were created to need a rest. And that play is likely a big part of what it means to be human!
Mike, you have real gift with writing!!
Thanks!
I think I got over a lot of worrying, my version of being too serious, when I made peanut butter from scratch, all that blending, and spatula work and when I baked bread from scratch, watched the holy rising, a magic, baking and then that first taste warm bread with blobs of sweet butter. A miracle. I think that playing is a way of getting away from one’s own ego and the intense that puts into play. I recommend too music. Playing an instrument and feeling the mystery your fingers and hands make touching to create sound. I played violin (oh my poor chin) and flute (oh my parent’s poor ears) and recorder, what an exquisite balance to get it just right, and the marimba and that magical instrument whose name I forget–it involved hitting a piece of metal silver with a thin metal bar and you can do it so badly if you try to rush in. And then the piano I played, practicing five hours a day. And giving recitals where I came to know just how important play was. There is no way you can even remember the whole score if you’re fussing about how good you’re going to do. You have to become invisible to yourself somehow. I recommend to everyone at least an hour of unselfish-consciousness every day.
And now what do I do since I virtually see no one to show off to or judge myself by. I say get lost, get lost to yourself so you don’t even know how you’re doing risk doing things completely different so that you’re surprising yourself every day. Play concentration keeps you from self awareness in the ways that may hurt you and interfere with how you are with other people.
I’m still looking for that Levertov poem. Do look at her writings though. She’s a great teacher.
Your writing is wonderful==I kind of breathe along with you, can hear you writing and feeling certain things as you write. What a great learning which is bound to be a big healing.
I finally found the Denise Levertov lines:
“Sweet procession, rose-blue.
If we’re here let’s be here now.”
From poem “Seems like we must be somewhere else”
And I think we must all dissolve into now together.
Thank you.
Look what I just found from John Lennon three days before he died. It’s in a RollingStone Interview:
“The hardest thing for me to do is play. . . . I can do everything else.”
He quipped that Paul must have been the source of all moments of play in his music. Z
I love this, Mike! Such a good reminder of what’s important and that we can’t connect with our hearts when we’re focused on performance. Blessings, my friend.
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