By: Helen Brush
Any parenting book will tout the importance of play for children: it teaches kids to share, collaborate and be creative. But play should remain important beyond childhood. It can be the foundation for joyful relationships, and provide relief when other parts of life feel mundane or even painful. This sentiment would be difficult to argue against, yet doesn’t manifest in the way that most adults express themselves and interact with others. As we grow, the sources of permission to be playful and silly change, and this part of childhoods often slips in priority, despite the delight and benefits it can bring. We start valuing it less, but play can be integral to both relationships and work, and is far from a trivial childhood activity. In particular, I’ve experienced that the permission to be playful — especially in intense academic environments — creates the connections we need to achieve greater creative and intellectual outcomes.
“Play” is nebulous, and I won’t attempt a rigorous definition (maybe something like Justice Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” comment suffices here) but to me, playfulness encompasses characteristics like the unexpected, openness, knowing and seeing the people around you, and working without necessarily having some outcome in mind. And we can express playfulness differently; it could take the more familiar forms of, say, children laughing and playing tag, but but could also expand in more subtle forms, like telling an unexpected story or engaging in a loosehearted flirtation with a cashier.
While these fundamental elements of playfulness seem to remain the same as we grow up, we seek permission from different sources. As children, playfulness is a default — a stuffed animal becomes a best friend, or a backyard another planet. But children are taught to restrain themselves based on the environment; they learn early on that you need permission from an adult to be playful in libraries, at the homes of certain adults, or in waiting rooms. We also learn that restraint and seeking permission for silliness is praised: a kid gets a lollipop for sitting quietly through a gathering. Although I grew up in a family that gave me range to be a playful kid — especially as a girl, as our whimsy is policed more than our male counterparts — I also received praise and was called “mature” for being a reserved young woman who could sit quietly and compartmentalize my energy.
As we grow up, we no longer look to the adults in charge for cues on whether we’re allowed to be silly or not. As teenagers hyperaware of how others perceive us and fighting to avoid embarrassment, we restrain ourselves. As adults, it’s harder to prioritize playfulness over sometimes overwhelming responsibilities, particularly in a culture where it feels like every action should have a productive output. Prioritizing meeting up with your friends to hang out and make each other laugh somehow becomes something childish and trivial, something that it is difficult to give ourselves permission to do. Women are especially expected to put the needs of others above their own; it is often seen as selfish for us to prioritize play. Basically, instead of asking an adult authority for endorsement to be playful, it seems that we start asking ourselves: “Is there something else I could be doing that would be more worth my time, or does someone else think that there’s something else I could be doing that would be more worth my time?”
The sentiment I perceive to be common in (American) adults is that while being playful with your friends is nice, it is immature and counterproductive to success to prioritize it. I don’t think this has to be the case. I’ve experienced intense academic rigor: math classes where problem sets took upwards of 30 hours per week, relentless readings, and stringently evaluated papers. These experiences certainly pushed me intellectually, but one of my most valuable professional and educational experiences was defined not only by its academic rigor and hard work, but also the joy and looseness it brought.
During the three months I spent living and taking field ecology courses with 10 classmates at a remote field station in Kenya, we had very few distractions except for each other. My group spent our evenings writing reports together, playing cards, watching birds and monkeys from our porches, and telling stories. Our world was each other, our instructors, the staff at the research station, and our abundant wildlife neighbors. And even though we barely knew each other beforehand, a shared and remote space far from the pressures and diversions of an East Coast campus machine quickly fostered close connections.
Our environment required us to be vulnerable with each other almost immediately. We spent months living out of single suitcases, wearing the same few (increasingly tattered) shirts every day. We picked ticks off of each other after exhausting days in the field. We stumbled through experimental design and data collection in an unfamiliar ecosystem. We served as confidants and advice-givers, since our friends and families were on the other side of the world.
This vulnerability and lack of external distractions gave us permission to prioritize playfulness. Play requires vulnerability; you have to trust that the people you are with will reciprocate, will not respond with frustration, and will not diminish their view of you and your abilities. Since we already had to be vulnerable with each other, play followed organically: we started with impish quips at each other while walking transects through thorny brush, and as we became more relaxed in each others’ presence, we spent evenings in puddles of laughter as we edited reports, prepared presentations, and shared daydreams about what we might do with our lives. And since there were few distractions in the form of other people, we had no need to self-censor our play (the answer to “does someone else think that there’s something else I could be doing that would be more worth my time?” was usually “no”). We were on the brink of early adulthood — no longer looking for permission from an adult, but not yet settled into pulling back on our expression.
Some of our silliness came from the near-delirium brought on by the long, hot days measuring thorny acacia branches and classifying ants. Other play emerged during meandering evenings when we were each others’ sole entertainment. But most of all, I think we felt seen and free to express our full, uninhibited, spirited selves. I remember sitting on a cliff’s ledge on a crisp evening watching the sun set over the savanna, laughing with my friends, and wondering when I’d be this happy again.
Building our connections on a foundation of playfulness and silliness contributed to trust and vulnerability in our relationships, which bolstered what we were able to achieve as a group in our work. Previously, I argued that vulnerability allowed us to be playful, but conversely, being silly with each other continued to build comfort with each other — a strong foundation for our training as collaborative scientists.
Outside of its sterilized (Western) templates, good science (and learning, and writing, and…) can be playful, something that I experienced with this group. And since nearly all of our assignments were collaborative, our playful relationships directly shaped our work. The entire scientific process requires lack of inhibition in sharing silly ideas. Baring work to be critiqued by peers can be intimidating, but since we could laugh with each other through our physically vulnerable states, we trusted each other enough to share our most out-there thoughts about the projects we were working on. Occasionally someone would share an idea so silly that it would have us in tears (“dik-dik nose whistling by family size?”), but all of our best projects came from bona-fide, real life, playful brainstorms.
And since science and learning requires adapting to the unexpected (an aspect of play in my original description), our playful relationships were a force that kept us out of dead ends when things didn’t work as we hoped. When it became clear that our experimental design in an observational animal behavior project was a bit of a failure, we first took the pragmatic approach and refocused our methods to get some usable data. We didn’t spend any time silently blaming each other or wallowing in the few days that we had “wasted,” but rather truly laughed at our blunders (and constructed hyper-specific memes to commemorate). We learned from our mistakes and left them behind. And when absurd, unexpected things inevitably continued happening, like the walls of our rooms inexplicably becoming coated with hundreds of beetles, or paper discussions occurring in large bedrooms instead of classrooms, we could treat them as just that — absurd — and laugh about it (and sometimes keep laughing about it), and move on.
Silliness also gave us balance, resilience in our group dynamics, and joy. Throwing jokes at each other about funny sounding species names kept us in good spirits through long days of data collection. A shared repository of positive memories gave us perspective on the magnitude of our conflicts when they inevitably arose. And laughing so hard it made our chests hurt over something as ludicrous as a stained pair of pants was just delightful.
I hate to say study abroad changed me — it’s incredibly cliche — but it is true that I experienced something with this group of people that is challenging to find as an adult: the permission to enjoy a full range of emotional expression and share in playful relationships while also working hard. And while I can’t recreate this unique time and place, I strive to remember what gave us full permission to be playful in Kenya, and bring pieces of this into my adult life. Play takes time to ramble and build, like evenings I spent with my cohort watching spiders spin webs, so I will create space and give it permission to build. I will value afternoons spent with friends doing “nothing,” and take pride in my work, but never take myself too seriously.
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