Play Can Save Us

The numbing ubiquity of human despair and political idiocy is enough to get a guy down. I spend far too much of my retired life with the New York Times on my lap.  My privilege requires that I pay attention, despite knowing that I can’t do a damn thing about most of it.

But there are much-needed antidotes . . .

Among the delicious distractions are the several times each week we pick our 3rd grade grandson up from Red Hawk Elementary School. He is delicacy enough, but the more comprehensive visual and visceral experience is watching the kindergarten and first grade girls and boys in end-of-school-day recess. Their playground is directly in front of our regular parking spot. Our typical early arrival allows 20 or 30 minutes of undiluted giggles.

My several-decade tenure as a head of school was sustained through the tension and tedium of governance and management by my ever-undiminished affection for kids - little ones and big ones.  Hardly a day passed when I didn’t layer my “real” responsibilities with swaths of kid time; sitting in classes, exchanging high fives, joining a discussion, shooting a few hoops.

It was indulgent, but not fattening, unlike a chef who simply can’t limit the love for her wares. I’ve written before about a posse of 2nd grade girls who took to calling me “Stevie.” It became our tradition and was particularly interesting when I was touring the school with a donor or some educator type who believes that greetings and salutations are to be “respectful” and deferential.  (Hi Stevie!!) I have been retired for7 years and the posse members are in their late 20s.  They still call me “Stevie” on Facebook.

The afternoon playground is like a colony of scurrying ants, but much noisier.  The purposes of the visual and auditory cacophony is hard to discern at a glance, but much is revealed to those with patience, or nothing else to do, like grandparents keenly focused on the details.

There are constant, shifting, chases and alliances; the boys more catastrophically aimless and the girls more conspiratorially connected.  Yesterday, a group of girls seemed to be cooperating in the behavior management of a boy who seemed bent on smacking another boy. The intervention was successful, but as things are with boys, recidivism soon required another round of mediation.  

The fashion alone is a buffet. Girls in crinoline skirts, cowboy boots and sequined tops, sitting near or in the dirty remnants of last week’s snowfall.  Boys, and some girls, are apparently impervious to the cold, bare arms and legs laughing through the late afternoon chill.  

It defies physics and probability that no child ever seems to be knocked silly while cluelessly wandering in the path of a swing piloted by an ambitious aerialist. Every small collision or dispute is resolved or forgotten in mere seconds as those involved just get up, change direction, and find another crew to join.  For reasons inexplicable, but surely important, a boy or girl will pause, lower to the ground and thoroughly examine some natural formation or substance that is invisible to those of us whose curiosity has been dulled by age or distorted priorities.  Kids are explorers, scientists and artists, finding interest and meaning in what we falsely believe mundane.  They are explorers, scientists and artists until, of course, we test and teach it out of them, bending their observations and discoveries to our particular expectations, thereby diminishing their fascinations.

I have some reservations about this school. Few could live up to my undiluted progressivism.  But the school is far more joyful than grim, testimony to the intentions of the community.  At recess the several teachers huddled at a distance, oblivious to most of the action. I consider that to be very good teaching indeed.

These 20 or 30 minutes, and any other such recesses, are far and away the most important parts of their days. The physical activity is not just healthy for the body, but so too for the brain. They navigate complex relationships, compromise, accommodate, resolve conflict, and learn to lead and to follow.  They learn physics; momentum, gravity, mass, acceleration and more.  They absorb the world and begin finding their places in it.

Aside from the physical and cognitive potency of this experience (much of which is indisputable, yet unknown to most “educators”), these times are when humans are most alive.  I regularly reflect on the wisdom of the cardiologist/running guru George Sheehan, whose words accompanied my own rediscovery of body and play many years ago. He reminded readers to always remember that we are mammals - unfortunately complex and distracted from our biological roots.  We are but one type among a diverse range of our mammalian species. Mammals move for purpose, of course. Survival over the millennia required action -  but nowadays Uber and DoorDash can relieve us from even moving from our recliners.  

All mammals play and it is at our individual and collective peril that we forget how.  Sheehan saw running as play, even in the purposeful regimen of serious training. His advice, which has stayed with me for 4 decades, was, “First of all, be a good mammal.”

There are forest schools in Europe and isolated progressive speckles in North America, who center all learning on experience, primarily outdoors. (The Watershed School in Boulder, where I serve on the board, is among the best of them.) In addition to the bio-neurological power of the learning, these small humans are developing an inextinguishable  and inextricable connection to the natural world and their place in it. 

We should want that for every child. The world would be a kinder, wiser, more compassionate place.  But at least there is recess at Red Hawk Elementary - and watching them learn to be good mammals never fails to bring a smile.