Have you ever watched a baby learn to crawl? Or witnessed the tremendous effort as they learned to pull themselves upright by grasping a (hopefully sturdy) table? Maybe you've vicariously enjoyed the surprise and delight of the baby's first steps, and the heady rush when the baby realizes,"Hey, I can run! And I can make Mom chase me!!!"
All of these accomplishments, and the attendent joy of mastery, are something most of us have experienced. These are not small things. To go from zygote to stair climbing, precariously at age one or two, oh-so-confidently by age five or six, and perhaps explosively as a teenager, is an amazing example of sweet and in some ways simple, human progress. At some point in life the stairs become a bit more challenging, weighed down as we may be by children, laundry, groceries or maybe just the list of what we have to do for the day. As life goes on the stairs may become just one more thing to get through.
Can we learn to reclaim the joy of our original great accomplishment? Can we get it back?
There was a time when I could play all day and late into the dusk of a summer evening. Running like a pack of dogs with the neighborhood kids, building forts, riding bikes to "Paradise Ditch," running up and sliding down a grassy knoll time without number, all this stuff and more. We would play games like hopscotch, (we never actually knew the rules but that didn't stop us) jump rope, tag (and freeze tag!), kickball, kick the can, red rover, mother may I. I guess we'd learned some of these and other games from the neighborhood youth center, or school, but some of them were passed down from older kids. The moms would start calling us in for supper, finally having to get good and mad, (but quite practiced in the charade) before we would finally give it up and go in to have the sweaty rings of dirt scrubbed off our necks and sit down to, perhaps, tuna cassarole. Maybe there was ice cream for dessert. Every night. And at least some of us stayed bean pole skinny in spite of a crappy American diet.
Yeah, well, clearly those days are gone. Not just for me but, for better or for worse, for most of our society as well. Now we have to figure out how to get exercise into our day. We have to work at play.
But we are the same person that sprang from that zygote. We once took a leap into the unknown to learn to climb those stairs. We didn't have a concept of gravity, of the force arrayed against us. We risked everything! Not because we wanted to get our heartrate up into the fat burning zone but just because we could. Heady stuff if you ask me.
So here we are, beautiful spirits in possession of an awesome wonder of the universe that we call "the human body." Unlike the zygote, (as far as we know) we can change our perspective. We can remember what it felt like to play and play and play and play. We can try to bring that with us to whatever we endeavor. Maybe we forget, maybe we slip. But we try again, and we smile, because we can.
Here's to playing for change!