Why play matters

Posted byHannah Frost Leave a comment on Why play matters

Want to know what I’m worried about this week? Saturday night we’re going over to our friends’ house to eat fajitas and watch college football.

Ok, fine, I’m not losing sleep over it. But I have thought about it a lot. I still have a little bit of anxiety about social situations where I might reveal my incompetence (or ignorance), like discussing everybody’s Netflix shows or watching football. One of the unexpected challenges of adjusting to life in Texas has been my relationship to football. 

Hard core Aggies fan from SECRant.com

Actually it’s much bigger than that. It’s been a mental journey of accepting the value of games in general and defining my theology of play. I used to think of games as primarily time wasters. During last year’s football season, my husband Erik would watch the games on Saturdays. I would lay down beside him on the couch with my head in his lap and take a nap. It was a win-win. But now I’m starting to realize God created us to grow and learn, and one of the ways people learn is by playing. It’s like a no-consequences practice ground for life. Maybe I need to have room in my heart for the value of football, which is so dear to the culture I’m now living in. 

We invest with the temporary currency so we can earn more of the longer-lasting one

Last weekend I got to meet Erik’s uncle in East Texas for the first time. His uncle was telling us about the family history and he said, “We always used to play dominoes with Dad when we were kids. We had to learn to keep track of everything in our heads to know what everyone else probably had in their hand, and watch what they were playing. I think that’s the main reason I grew up good at math.”

And he nailed the main reason I don’t inherently enjoy playing dominoes with Erik’s family– they’ve been practicing this kind of math since childhood, and it’s work for me to try to keep up. For me, “play” has always been more like throwing dice; it’s the thrill of not knowing or controlling what will happen. But for this family, play is training. It’s stretching your brain and matching it against the capacities of others. It’s the thrill of seeing how far you can go, how well you can strategize. And I think that is somehow Biblical. 

Dominoes on a rail by Tatiana Rodriguez (unsplash.com)

It reminds me of the verse “I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings,” (Lk 16:9) because we can see a progression of currencies. Right now on earth we have the currency of money, theoretically backed by precious metals. But that’s only true in this current system. We have to exchange it for a longer-lasting currency, investing it in relationships before we die, because in the next life we won’t use the currency of money; we will use the currency of relationships. 

In the same way, when we’re kids, we have the currency of play. We pay with our time, energy, imagination, maybe humility of losing– but there are no other real-world consequences of the game. In return we earn skills that will serve us later. Maybe speed, calculation, multitasking, making choices, delayed gratification, planning. Then when we’re adults we transition into a real-world system with different kinds of consequences, and those same skills become our new currency. It’s valuable to invest with the temporary currency so we can earn more of the longer-lasting one: money becomes relationships; play becomes useful skills. 

If we win, you take a shot of it. And if we don’t win, you don’t drink it

So back to the fajitas. Now it’s football season, and Texans love to spend every weekend watching college kids invest their sweat and muscle into a game that will teach them new currencies for life, like teamwork, persistence and learning from failure. I am starting to see value in that.

I was still thinking about football this morning when I went to our neighborhood pool to swim laps. I finally joined the pool this year, because it is Way. Too. Hot. to be outside running. The pool is outdoors, but it’s open year round, which still blows my Midwesterner mind. Our neighborhood was built around 1980 and still has quite a few retired people, so most mornings during Adult Swim time it looks like the Senior Center took a field trip to the shallow end. There is always a gaggle of people in long-sleeved shirts and fisherman hats standing around in the water leaning on noodles and making conversation. 

This morning the pool was full of swimmers; there were people sharing every single lane. In between laps, I took a break to chat with Mindy, a former swim coach who is in the pool every time I go. She was telling me how tired she was after a long work week when suddenly a white-haired lady on the far left lane stood up and shouted to a short bald-headed man in the far right lane, 

“Did I ever give you a bottle of that cherry bounce?” 

Mindy and I looked over at her, as did three or four other lap swimmers who popped up like prairie dogs because normally no one shouts during Adult Swim. The old man squinted over at her. 

“No, you didn’t,” he said. “What even is that?” 

I was glad he asked, because it sounded like fabric softener to me, and I wasn’t sure why someone would have thought of fabric softener so urgently in the middle of swimming on a Friday morning.

When she opened her mouth to shout back to him, her words came out abnormally high-pitched from the strain of the distance (even though voices carry better across the water, and by now everyone was listening.) 

“It’s BOOZE!”  she squealed.  

Five or six swimmers started laughing. Mindy said, “wow, we all perked up at that!” 

The lady continued. “It’s cherries from Door County, with a bounce. It’s got a little vodka in it. It’s like a fruitcake; you have to make it ahead and let it sit.”

Someone said we’d all like a bottle of that, but she kept talking to the man as if she didn’t see anyone watching from the five lanes between them. 

“I’ll bring you some. The thing with it is, if we win, you take a shot of it. And if we don’t win, you don’t drink it.” 

I chuckled as I put my head back down and pushed off from the wall again. I wonder who “we” was understood to mean. Probably either UT or the Aggies. For now I’ll keep training by swimming my laps in this sunny water, but God bless all the kids out there developing life skills by sweating on football fields this fall, and the Texas senior citizens honoring the value of play with their shots of cherry bounce. 

What does play mean to you? (Scroll down for comments!)

Published by Hannah Frost

I'm a 30-something who suddenly ended up married and living in Texas. Before that I had been single and overseas doing mission work for about a decade, so it was a shock. I blog to process and reflect.

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