Stay and Play

On having fun in a fragile world

It has been a strange couple of weeks. We returned from a warm Brittany to a very hot England and soon found ourselves subsumed by the heatwave. By this point it feels almost cliché to point out that we English are struggling to adjust to the blazing hot summers that are swiftly becoming our norm – but it’s true. When our temperatures climb we seem to enter into a state of fearful paralysis (hello!) or utter denial, blathering on about how ‘it was this hot in 76’ you know!’ (it wasn’t).

Whilst most schools in Somerset closed due to a lack of air con, my neighbour’s builders still rocked up to continue work on her extension. Likewise, my son’s privately owned nursery remained open despite internal room temperatures reaching 32 degrees. I took him out and we spent a couple of days playing in the cool of our living room. We listened to music: Elizabeth Mitchell’s You Are My Little Bird and Laura Marling’s new album Laura Sings Raffi, and podded broad beans just harvested from our allotment.

On Sunday I went to church. I’d not been for a few weeks but for some reason felt that I needed to go. The priest spoke of a God whose gives each of us particular qualities that the world needs. This is something the Quaker writer Parker Palmer describes as our ‘birthright gift of self’ -

There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one's self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, 'In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'

from Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer

Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to reject our vocations, the priest pointed out. He felt, for example, that one of his vocations was to be a playful person, someone who seeks out joy and fun in whatever situation he is in and shares it with other people. He explained that as he’d grown older and taken on more responsibility, he’d quietly stepped back from that calling. The heavy things he had wound up carrying as an adult had displaced his natural, playful way of being in the world.

What he was saying made a lot of sense.

Playing

According to Play Scotland, play is ‘behaviour which is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated¹’ Viewed this way, play isn’t something that’s focussed on a particular outcome. It’s the act of playing itself that matters. We’re not playing in order to get a gold sticker but just because! Because it grounds us in a moment and makes that moment enjoyable. Because it makes being alive fun. Because we can.

Yesterday morning my daughter attended her first ‘stay and play’ at the school she’ll start in September. For the uninitiated, a stay and play is when children spend a couple of hours in the class they’ll transition to the following term. It’s usually pretty informal and designed to help children (and their grown ups) adjust to the sights, sounds and smells of their new environment. After some quick introductions my daughter was encouraged to go and play – ‘do whatever you want’ said her new teacher.

My daughter went pretty hard on the play side of things. She test-drove the dressing up box (a treasure-trove of sartorial delights), practiced cutting up patterned papers, took a red trike for a spin and imagined what a princess doll was getting up to in her carpeted kingdom. She also spent some time transferring multicoloured pom poms into buckets. As the session drew to a close we had storytime – Each Peach Pear Plum – and thought about the way all the characters have a picnic together at the end.

‘Now, isn’t that a nice thing to do’, said the teacher.

Staying

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about (deep breath) how my family and future generations might exist peaceably in a state of societal and ecological collapse. What does it mean to live in a world where the natural systems and planetary boundaries that have kept things in equilibrium for most of human existence are now unravelling? Where life, in all manner of domains, appears to be getting worse, rather than better? The writer Rosie Spinks describes this feeling as becoming ‘collapse aware’ -

To be collapse aware is to live with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. And then to ask the next obvious question head on: If the incrementalist approach of our existing political and economic structures is not up to the task of improving things — climate, society, inequality, injustice — what comes next?

How I Became Collapse Aware by Rosie Spinks

What comes next? She asks. Many people have offered answers to this question. More of the same, say some. The end of humanity, say others. Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper on collapse has often been critiqued as a doomerist manifesto - but whilst deeply disturbing, Spinks does not think that Bendell’s understanding of collapse means the literal end of ‘sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning’, rather ‘it’s an end to our “normal modes” of acquiring all those things.’

Rosie points out that the best climate thinkers of the past decade have consistently offered the same answer to this question of what to do next: we need to become people of place. People who are grounded and knowledgeable about the places we inhabit, people who spend time in the company of our neighbours and natural places. By connecting with the places we find ourselves located in we can boost our community’s level of resilience and preparedness. Think Global, Act Local is one common way of describing this posture.

The past six months of my life have shown me the importance of place. In January I wrote about how my community held me in the midst of family illness and grief. Staying in one place and getting to know its communal infrastructure has meant that I have been able to benefit from the mutual aid that is available here.

Unlike Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, my plan is to stay on this earth, and more specifically, this patch of Somerset in England that has become my home. My plan is to stay with my community, to abide with them amidst collapse. And to allow myself to both benefit from and contribute to the ecosystem of care that already exists around me.

Because we can

Since the birth of my daughter just before the 2022 heatwaves I have struggled with anxiety whenever there is the possibility of a particularly hot spell. Usually this has manifested itself in compulsive behaviours, like obsessively checking weather forecasts and not leaving the house during a heatwave. Following a diagnosis of post-partum anxiety and OCD I received psychiatric care from the NHS to treat these tendencies, but nevertheless, these behaviours have persisted and seemed to become a part of who I am.

During this most recent burst of extreme weather I felt something that I hadn’t felt before. I think it was a sense of peace, an ability to move through the days not in a state of panic or fear, but a sense of acceptance that this is the world we are living in now. Perhaps it is because my children are no longer newborns, or perhaps this is part of being ‘collapse aware’, as Rosie Spinks puts it. But I have a feeling that it was because I was surrounded by small people who were at play, who were totally immersed in the act of having fun, just because.

Perhaps this feeling of peace was just a one time thing. I hope not. I hope that by staying and playing with my family and community I too can adjust to the sights, sounds² and smells of this new environment.

May you find ways to be playful in this brave new world.

1. Many thanks to digital gaming journalist Andy Robertson for introducing me to the world of play theory!

2