A Playful Path – Benard D.

Koven

When you stop playing, stop being playful, when you become inflexible, unresponsive, insensitive,
humorless, fearful, frenzied,

Following a playful path is not as much about being playful as it is about your being aware of
playfulness: your own playfulness, of wherever you see manifestations of playfulness. It’s about noticing
playfulness, noticing when you’re not playful, noticing when you’re not as playful as you want to be, or
wish you were, or wish you had been. The more present you are to playfulness, the more present it is in
you.

So, you surround yourself with reminders: friends, a spouse, pets, kids, joke books, puzzles, toys, happy
pith, playful hats, music, and photos, art supplies

release from expectation, from judgment, released into the moment of play,

The entrance to your playful path is wonder. The first step in the rediscovery of your play- fulness is that
moment when you allow yourself to wonder at something, to wonder at the beauty, the intricacy, the
touch, the sense, the workings of the world.

You don’t have to play to be playful. You don’t need toys or games or costumes or joke books. But you
do have to be open, vulnerable, you do have to let go.

Playfulness is all about being vulnerable, responsive, yielding to the moment. You might not be playing,
but you are willing to play, at the drop of a hat, the bounce of a ball, the glance of a toddler, the wag of
a tail. You are open to any opportunity. You are loose. Responsive. Present.

Taking that step, braving the ridicule, the loss of control; to follow a playful path is, in truth, “the
shortest road to happiness.”

To play well, you have to play fully.

When you’re a kid, that’s exactly how you play: fully. You can’t help your self. Even if you could, you
wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be as much fun. But when you stop being a kid, it takes you longer to let
your self play as fully as you know you can. The world has gotten a lot more worrisome, people a lot
more complex, a lot more hidden from each other. So you’ve become more circumspect, more cautious,
and even when you decide to play, it takes you a while before you decide it’s safe enough for you to play
fully.

Playfulness opens you. It lightens your heart. It makes you more receptive. It engages more of you:
mind, body, senses, abilities.

you rediscover the person you love being: alive, energetic, caring, responsive. You laugh more
completely, you smile more deeply, you are a better friend, parent, lover. You dance more. You paint
more. You are more.
Play, especially when it is whole-hearted, whole-minded, whole-bodied, is an experience and expression
of personal power.

There’s a direct connection between the experiences of alienation and stress, and the amount of
enjoyment people are having – that the more alienated and stressed people are, the less fun.

Ask your self to tell you when it’s having fun.

You can have fun reading, browsing, searching for something on the computer. You can have fun eating.
Chewing gum. Knitting. Taking a walk. Tasting. Feeling. Smelling. Listening. Touch- ing. You can have fun
watching someone else have fun.

you can start asking your self to tell you when you’re feeling playful or even happy.

Kids play because they have to. It’s how they learn the world, how they grow, how they cope. For kids,
play is life. For grown-ups, play is a return to life. For grown-ups, play is ultimately and essentially a
spiritual experience, a renewal. This is what play brings us. This is what we bring to play.

I’m about playfulness, deep playfulness, the deepest playfulness I can reach, the deepest playfulness
itself can reach. I’m about a way of playing and a way of laughing and a way of healing that celebrates
life. The playfulness: the sheer, profound, infinite playfulness of it all.

So, here’s what you might need to remember:1) you can almost always choose to be playful, 2) you’re
almost always allowed to be playful, 3) and in all likelihood, you’ll be glad, and so will the people with
whom you are playing.

The more I played with adults, and the more groups I played with, the more deeply I appre- ciated the
power of children’s games. I learned that, in less than a day, I could take a group of strangers, from
virtually any background, and, playing children’s games, create a community – a responsive, supportive,
open, attentive, Play Community. And in five days, these total strangers’d be all over each other like
kittens!

Participating in a play community as adults, endowed with empathy and compassion and years of hard-
won knowledge, with obligations and responsibilities and actually deeper freedom – we redefine
ourselves, and the world. we re- discover our ability to play in the world, and to give each other the
gift of play. We rediscover our unlimited selves. We reaffirm fun. We let our selves out to play
and find our selves and each other once again on a playful path.

I think of fun and laughter as a spiritual experience. Our lives have become
increasingly fragile, our world increasingly harsh. It is a miracle that we can laugh
at all. And that’s why it is essential that we play and have fun.

In cooperative games, we are able to engage an entire community into play, regardless of
differences in age and ability, and more often than not, it is these differences that prove to be the
source of the challenge, the very thing that makes the game inviting and worth playing. It is the
differences between the actors that make the play worth playing.

Cooperative games nurture diversity. Competitive games lead to uniformity.

Play connects us. It is what we do to connect, to relate to each other, to build relationships, to
strengthen the connections between us, to create community. Our understanding of each other,
the love between us, grows deeper when we play together.

At play, we create new things, new ideas – even when we don’t speak the same language, don’t
come from the same neighborhoods, don’t have the same abilities, aren’t the same age, same
family, same color, same gender, don’t think the same, don’t believe the same, don’t act the
same, don’t wear the same uniform.

Because we can play, we can imagine, we can pretend, we can make each other laugh. Because
we can play, we can make art, dance, song, music, we can make up stories, make jokes, music,
songs, peace.

In play we explore, experiment, examine, express our very selves, we strengthen our bodies, our
minds, our understanding of our changing selves, our changing relationships, our deep- ening
love. Playing, we change, adapt to change, create change.

Playing and laughing together, especially when we play and laugh in public, for no reason, is a
profound, and, oddly enough, political act. Political, because when we play or dance or just laugh
in public, people think there’s some- thing wrong with us. It’s rude, they think. Childish. A
disturbance of the peace. Normally, they’d be right. Except now. Now, the peace has been deeply
disturbed – every- where, globally. And what those grown-ups are doing, playing, dancing,
laughing in public is not an act of childish discourtesy, but a political act – a declaration of
freedom, a demonstration that we are not terrorized, that terror has not won.

Playing openly, in places of business, in places where we gather to eat or travel or wait, is a gift of hope,
an invitation to sanity in a time when we are on the brink of global madness. Public play and laughter
are political acts, declarations that fear and terrorism have not won. Incontrovertible evidence
that there is hope.

Play and laughter are the gateways to health and happiness. As my friend Dr. Brian Sut- ton-
Smith, Defender of the Playful, notes, the opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.

Playing together, we discover trust. Laughing together, we discover harmony. Through play and
laughter we transcend tragedy, we challenge our physical limits, we celebrate health, we create
community, we redefine the daily game.

Making Things Fun:

If fun changes the way that we do things... how can we add more fun to what we
do?
What more could I do if I looked for ways to add more fun to the everyday? How
can I make things fun?

My first suggestion: start with the fun that is already there. Before trying
to add more fun, slow down enough to see the fun you are actually already having.
When you were a kid, you could have fun going downstairs on your bottom or
rolling a ball down the stairs or trying to bounce a ball up the stairs or trying to go
up the stairs backwards or walk down the stairs two- at-a-time. Same with reading
and running and counting and painting and dancing and hugging. That fun never
goes away.

What goes away is our willingness to choose to have the fun that is offered us.We
have too many other things to do.We’re not in the subway because we want to
play.We don’t take the escalator because it’s more fun.We are there because we
want to get somewhere else. So we aren’t, in fact, totally there. And because we
aren’t, we don’t see the fun.

Finding and following your playful path is all about letting yourself out to play. This explains
why if you were to ask me to help you bring more fun into your life one of the things I’d most
likely suggest is that you start making a list of as many things as you can think of that you
already do for fun - start making, because this is the kind of thing you can do for the rest of
your life.

Your mission:
To bring fun into the world. As long as you are in it.

we got so good at pretending to be grown up that only drugs and enthusiastic charismatics could
get us to pretend to be children again.

...In the mean time almost completely forgetting that we are all each ageless in the first place.

Give my self standing ovations whenever so moved.

GAMES:
It Could be Worse Game – pg 53
Out-Blessing Game – pg 56
There Must be a Good Reason – pg. 59
Hug Tag – pg. 129
Rock, Paper, Scissors Tag – pg. 133