Playing through the Pandemic: Some Thoughts on Play, Happiness and Human Development

10 Jul Playing through the Pandemic: Some Thoughts on Play, Happiness and Human Development

“it’s taken being locked down and closed in for us to be opened up”

The East Side Institute (Institute) of which I am the director is launching a new podcast in August called “All Power to the Developing.” I’d like to take its launch as an opportunity to share with you some thoughts about the activities and ideas that have led us to start this particular podcast at this particular time.

Development is a Human Right

The Institute is a center for social justice efforts that reinitiate human and community development.  Our work is based on the conviction that it’s not enough to be against the status quo. We need to create positive alternatives to the way things are, from the bottom up. What’s more, it’s by participating in the process of creating the new—whether that be new ways to govern, to educate, to build community, to see and feel and think and relate—that we human beings learn and grow. At the Institute we believe that all people have a need, a desire and the right to continuously develop. Thus, “all power to the developing!”

That’s the title of a paper I wrote back in 2003 with the late Fred Newman, the activist philosopher who co-founded the Institute with me more than thirty years ago. In that paper we highlighted an overlooked theme in Karl Marx’s writings, which is his focus on “the all round development of individuals.” He believed that the transformation of the world into one that meets people’s needs requires that all the world’s people develop. That’s something very important that we took from Marx’s work, built upon and promoted. It’s been very challenging because development is not an everyday concept except in so far as people think about babies developing by stages. Or the field of development in the world, which is fundraising. Or the UN development goals, which address critically important things, including poverty and illiteracy, but don’t mention the right to develop itself. For the most part, people don’t think about development as something that we as human beings create by constantly transforming the circumstances we’re in. As we change the world, we change ourselves, and as we change ourselves, we change the world. I invite you to think about that as a more powerful description of development.

The Institute has been working for almost four decades to help people experience creating development. All people. Because so many things about our world stop development. Poverty, inequality and violence stop development. So does the intense alienation and individualism that’s characteristic of US and, increasingly, all the world’s societies and cultures. We have been successful in spreading development to the extent we have connected to and partnered with committed and creative activists, scholars, artists, helpers and healers all over the world and actively supported them to enhance the work they are doing to involve their communities in building positive alternatives to the status quo by reinitiating development—through performance and play, because we believe that we’re all performers and that play is essential for continuous development.

Locked Down and Opened Up

Then the pandemic hit. Many people began to think that the world’s development had stopped or it that it will stop until the economies get running again. Or they feel that their creativity will stop because they’re stuck in their house and “life” is on hold. Or much worse than that—that there can be no development because hundreds of thousands are dying from Covid-19.

But it turns out—as we at the Institute and many other people around the globe are finding out—that this crisis is providing opportunities for development.

Ironically, it’s taken being “locked down” and closed in for us to be opened up to see and be in new ways.

Recently I did this very simple exercise with a grouping of people on Zoom. I said, “Just look around where you are right now and find an object and tell us about it, tell us how you might be seeing it in a new way since sheltering in place.” And everybody was able to do that immediately, to show us an object that has new meaning for them while they are quarantined. Then I asked, “What was that about?” People said, “I’m seeing the same things in entirely new ways” and “I’m seeing brand new things I hadn’t noticed before.”

That experience is potentially huge. It’s an “all power to the developing” experience. And we can all do it. What are the possibilities it opens up of seeing and doing, for example, politics in new ways? Or the doing of education, of school, of family, of healthcare, of every single institution that seems so stuck, in new ways? They are possibly opened up. If you can experience seeing in new ways and seeing things you never saw before, you can create new possibilities, and if you’re creating new possibilities, you’re creating hope.

That simple exercise is a kind of playing, and playing is key to developing and transforming. Playing, as we understand it, is beyond imagining, beyond dreaming, beyond learning social skills, beyond cognition. It’s a social activity that brings new possibilities into the world. Playing is about experiencing our sociality and species consciousness. Over and over again people of different ages who have stopped playing—because play is either disallowed or only something little kids do—have said to me after playing for the first time in years, things like, “It helps me belong;” “I don’t feel so alone;” “I created something with these other people;” “I never saw my boss except as my boss, but now we created a new relationship.” We can play with anything, we can play with words and sounds, we can play with fear and anxiety. We can, indeed, play with the pandemic.

Play is Magical and Mundane

I think play connects with development and transformation because play helps you experience your sociality. I don’t care if you’re playing in your room by yourself, it still does because whatever it is that you’re imagining is part of the social world. You could be imagining that you’re a doctor or that you’re a famous artist or whatever, but those things are created socially by human beings.

Play also frees us up to do what we don’t know how to do. That, to me, is the essence of play. Just watch little children; they’re always playing at doing things before they know how to do them. For teens and adults, play unlocks the huge handcuffs that knowing puts on us because when you’re playing, you’re doing what you don’t know how to do. You’re making funny faces, if that’s the kind of play you’re doing, or you’re philosophizing, seeing things in new ways, playing with the assumptions of the society around you. When you’re playing, you’re asking lots of questions but never giving any answers. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be and you don’t know how to do it and that’s what makes play so developmental.

With a Little Bit of Happiness …

Another great thing about play is that it makes you happy. When we create a little bit of happiness it allows us to see and do things in new ways. We can move closer to hope and farther from despair. I’d like you to think about how our governments around the world and so many of our social institutions actively repress our happiness. They’re all about keeping the world the way it is—full of violence, hunger, inequality, both gross and subtle injustices—which keeps us angry, scared, sad and lonely. About a month ago, I was hearing from people around the world who had participated in Zoom play sessions organized by Institute faculty members Marian Rich, Cathy Salit and many others. They were saying how important happiness was for carrying on with their lives and social justice efforts. Nobody used the words, “Now I’m happy,” but they were saying things that we associate with being happy. “I don’t feel so alone anymore; I’m so scared; I’m joyful.” Here’s another quote from a virtual play workshop participant, “It really surprised me that I can make something new out of anything around me. I learned that through play, I can change the world.” That was somebody who had done an hour of play online with people from all over the world she had never met before. That’s very impressive—one hour of play and beginning to feel she can change things, that she’s a changemaker! That was an expression of power.

So, joy, happiness, possibility, connection, belonging, all these things happen through play. Our societies in “normal times,” before the pandemic, repress those kinds of things. They focus on having to make it on your own, having to know what you’re doing and doing it the “right way.”  We’re taught that we have to know where we’re going before we can get there.  And then, for much of the world, “normal” is the daily exhausting struggle to put enough food on the table (if you have a table) to survive. The “normal” world denigrates play and allows little space or time or energy for it, and without play we remain stuck in the same old ways of seeing and doing that are causing us so much pain.

You never know what the history is going to throw at you. The irony is that this terrible pandemic has forced us inside, and inside we’re much more connected. We’re getting to experience, out of necessity, the very things that produce joy and happiness and connection and belonging and possibility. The challenge is how to keep that going and build on it as the pandemic drags on and the fight for social justice grows and grows.

That’s why we’re starting the “All Power to the Developing” podcast during this time of pandemic and social upheaval.  It’s an invitation to play with us. And grow.

Here are some interactive sites that offer virtual play opportunities generated in this period of the pandemic:

• • The Global Play Brigade is an international group of improvisors and play educators around the world who offer dozens of free online play session every week.
  • Performing the World Happening(s)  is a virtual adaptation of the Performing the World conference, which brings hundreds of play and performance activist from around the world to share their work (play). There will be online workshops, panels, performances and conversations every weekend between July 25 and August 30.