Leave my husky alone for a bit, and (if she doesn't go sleep under a spruce tree) she'll invent a game. This may be "cut me off as I try to walk to the car." It may be "throw the ball up for myself and run to catch it." It may be "gently wrestle with the cat as it bats my head with its paws." Or it may be "run circles around an older dog on our path just to annoy it." The point, though, is play (versus, say, barking at a balloonist or ultralight pilot as these strange craft slowly crawl over our air space). Even the more sedentary cats know this (they like to play "race around the house chasing each other over around and through everything because it's 5:30 a.m.").
Children know this too---leave them alone, and they'll invent a game. Creativity and play just seem natural.
So what happens to adults? When and why do we lose that sense of playful inventiveness? Why not take rolling chairs and books and construct bumper chair wars, for example? Why do we design "sport" as structured by rules, a serious business that must be done only by proper procedures?
What happened to the game? As Oscar Wilde observed, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”
Sport serves a lot of other good purpose as well, of course—exercise lowers blood pressure, prevents diabetes, controls metabolism and weight, lowers stress, boosts the immune system, strengths the heart and much more. Yet so many people accomplish this—the ones who address it at all—by going to the gym, often hating the trip, forcing themselves to do so. Why? What happened to joyful exercise?
The joy of sliding down that hill. The rush of diving into a strong swimming pace. The feel of hitting that perfect tennis stroke. The accomplishment of hitting that difficult golf shot. Or just the fun of volleyball with friends, or wrestling with a husky, or rushing around with the cats.
Life should be fun. Remember to play.
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I completely agree. Your second paragraph, "Children know this too---leave them alone, and they'll invent a game. Creativity and play just seem natural," immediately opened the childhood memory floodgate. I'll never forget the times where twenty of us kids would just stay outside all day and play and invent the most absurd games imaginable; i.e - hide and seek that covered the entire neighborhood, water fights where blasting someone on full-power with a hose was completely legal, etc. As we age, we somehow lose sight of this childhood imagination and start to take life way to seriously. This is why we look at kids and just envy their careless demeanor. But why can't we live like this? At what age do we become so uptight? As a society, we need to lighten up a lot more, and just let our creative genius out a bit.
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