How Did You Play?
When Stuart Brown, author of Play, How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul, was asked: How can a review of one’s own life history of their play be helpful, he responded:
“If adults can begin to reminisce about their happiest and most memorable moments, they can capture the emotion and visual memories of those moments and begin to connect again to what truly excites them in life. Generally, a person’s purest emotional profile—temperament, talents, passions– is reflected in positive play experiences from childhood. If you can understand your own emotional profile when it was in its purest form, you can begin to apply it to your adult life. Going through this process may encourage someone to give serious consideration to shifting to another job that may bring them more joy, or to infuse their current life with those elements that once brought them enlivenment but may have been left behind as they conformed to cultural stereotypes of success.”
Please click the link below to share your play history.
4 Comments
January 5, 2010 at 8:22 am
George Dyson sent me the following story this morning:
Julian Himely Bigelow, fourth of five siblings, was born on 19 March 1913 in Nutley, New Jersey–42 miles from Princeton. At the age of three, while staying with an aunt, “he found a screw driver, and removed all the door knobs and put them in a big pile, and it took him a really long time to put all these door knobs back.”
May 25, 2010 at 12:33 am
Dear Linda
I would really like to connect with you in connection with your article on email apnea and breathing. I have a breathing solution that is profound and was wondering if you would like to experience it
Mish
August 2, 2010 at 8:54 am
As young kids, several boys including my brother and me and other kids from our neighborhood, played two kinds of games. First were regular sports games: baseball football etc; second were made up war games in the the woods behind our house. We were profoundly influenced by the television show Combat, and would each take roles from that show and divide up into armies, or sometimes not bother to divide and just attack an invisible enemy.
As I got a bit older, all of my playing was about music, almost all my friends from adolescence are musicians and many of them are still friends. It was creative, participatory, and had great qualities of being both collaborative and competitive.
Great to meet you this past wkend, you were a gracious introducer for this foo neophyte. stay in touch!
August 2, 2010 at 1:48 pm
My early adolescence was experienced in a Canadian tenement. When not getting shooed away from the affluent park across the street, we played at Star Trek, each assuming a persona while mixing our slowly thawing freezes into a different spectrum of color before slowly relishing them. On Christmas morning my father had arranged the entire living room area into a battlefield, the two inch off-yellow and green troops poised to engage upon our arrival. In the Winter, much of our time was spent outdoors, building snow figures, makeshift igloos, or shoveling snow in the local field to skate.
Most of my memories are communal. It wasn’t until the my teens that I randomly discovered Kerouac and began traveling both intellectually and physically (read: hitchhiking with an obscenely large cardboard thumb across several countries). – am laughing to think about this now…