Adults At Play

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” said George Bernard Shaw. Do you remember the last time you played? I mean properly played, with belly laughs and emoji-style chortling and the giddy exhaustion that keeps an excited smile on your face and a flush on your cheeks for hours afterwards? For most of us, this kind of skittish, uncomplicated fun dates back to childhood Saturdays spent romping around the neighbourhood with peers on boot skates or bikes. Friends, freedom, fresh air and being homework-free, mixed with that liberating lack of expectation you have as a child, made for exhilarating afternoons that generated a joyousness impossible to replicate in adult life. Why impossible? Because we become so quickly bogged down as grown-ups. Not just distracted or troubled but literally stuck in the muddiness of the world around us, from politics and our own professions to societal issues and relationship woes. How can we experience the weightlessness of those unadulterated high spirits when we’re up to our knees in sludge all the time?

It’s not that we don’t have a good time in midlife. As adults, we enjoy leisure time, downtime, quiet time and wine time, but rarely do we embrace good old-fashioned fun with abandon.

This isn’t just because of our schedules and anxieties, it’s because play can simply feel a little ridiculous. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Meredith Sinclair, author of Well Played: The Ultimate Guide to Awakening Your Family’s Playful Spirit, explained, “As we get older, our egos grow. We become more self-conscious. Play feels silly, unproductive and time-consuming. But this is precisely why we should make more time for it.” Sinclair sees channelling our inner child as a temporary release from the worries of the modern world. I watched a Ted Talk recently by American psychiatrist Stuart Brown called Play Is More Than Just Fun. He asserts that, “Nothing lights up the brain like play.” But more than that, he found that severe play deprivation and “a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play”, such as he saw in mass murderers he’d worked with over the years, led them to be more vulnerable to the tragedies they eventually perpetrated.

While the absence of play is not going to transform every child into a serial killer, consider Johnny Depp’s 2005 portrayal of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka as an example of the less horrific, but still traumatic, impact a lack of play in childhood can have on an individual. Subjected to sadistic dental treatment by his father, deprived of Halloween treats and no doubt the fun and games that traditionally accompany them, the boy becomes isolationist, anti-social and displays a macabre enjoyment of the demise of each of his golden ticket holders. Research now suggests that the absence of play in adults’ lives could have similarly negative effects, contributing to higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety. In fact, Brown describes play not as the opposite of work but the opposite of depression, and according to research published by The European Journal for Humour Research, “Adult playfulness demonstrated robust positive relations with life satisfaction” among other aspects of wellbeing.

Eight years ago, I was lucky enough to sample that purity of childhood cheer when I embarked on an eight-day residential therapy course. I had just been made redundant (for the first time!) and was being harangued by my mortgage lender to make payments I could not afford, to the point where I felt if I didn’t do something radical to help myself cope with my circumstances, I might just lie on the rug on my bedroom floor for the rest of that year (I tried it one morning and it felt frighteningly good). Within this week-long process – during which time there were no phones, laptops, iPads, televisions, radios, newspapers or magazines – of talking, writing, meditating and sharing with strangers, there was an element of ‘play”. It was the last thing I expected on such a “serious”, grown-up endeavour, and it intimidated me far more than having to bare my soul to the other 15 attendees. Why? Because I’m an introvert, self-conscious, easily embarrassed, and can sometimes feel ridiculous, so the idea of having childlike fun – in front of other adults – was as appealing as going naked on a first date. Like many women, my self-consciousness was threatening to get the better of me.

It didn’t on this occasion because it couldn’t. I’d come so far on my eight-day journey that I was going to see it through to the bitter “fun-filled” end. But how do we bring a little of the ridiculous into our lives, without feeling foolish, when we spend every day trying so hard to be the serious grown ups we’re expected to be? When I was reading around this subject, I came across more than one article advising organisations to embrace a “play ethic”.

To be honest corporate “organised fun” is my idea of pure hell; you might as well ask me to perform a mime. In any case, many of us don’t work for companies, or at all.

Play is something we need to take individual responsibility for if it’s going to have any real meaning within our lives. Sinclair suggests we reflect on our childhood memories and our favourite ways to play, and then examine when we last had similar feelings as an adult. “What current activities bring you close to that same unabashed feeling you had as a youngster?”

This is good advice because the one thing my stint of play therapy taught me back in 2012 is that sophisticated suggestions aren’t the answer, and over-thinking the notion won’t help either. It’s a much more primitive and elementary kind of action that’s required. Remember how much fun the late Princess Diana looked to be having with young William and Harry the day she took them to Thorpe Park in 1993 and got soaked riding the water slides? For me, it’s this kind of earthy, uninhibited act that makes me happy in a guileless, candid kind of way. Did any of you ever visit Dun Laoghaire’s Rainbow Rapids back in the 1980s? I did, and it elicited the same level of excitement in my childhood self as waking up to snowfall. So now, swimming at Seapoint or the Forty Foot gives me back a glimmer of that same sort of joy and energy. Running crazily after my little Bijon-cross in the dog park always makes me laugh out loud too. She has Yoda-like ears that flap out like aeroplane wings when I tell her I’m going to get her.

When I was a child, my family spent every summer in County Wexford (like most other South County Dubliners who weren’t in Brittas Bay) and when it rained we’d play board games – backgammon, Scrabble, draughts. When lockdown began, my sister and I, on a whim, began playing Scrabble again, and although our vocabularies are more sophisticated now, our gamesmanship is not, so the same giddiness and goofiness that characterised our matches 30-odd years ago remains, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. In midlife, we become so accomplished at being thoughtful, professional, considered – all the things that fly in the face of having genuine fun – that play can become as alien to us as embarrassment is to a baby. From six years to 66, we all need to play. Whether we like it or not.

Marie Kelly, August 2020.

When was the last time you played? Tell us in comments box below!