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The Serious Business Of Play

ByClaire Maguire

I have been thinking about play. The kind of play that seems natural to a child – absorbed, unselfconscious, and often appears purposeless. And I found myself wondering: where did that ability to play go as we grow up? Or that we consider play to be something faintly embarrassing for an adult to want, something we have to dress up as a hobby or a wellness practice before we’re allowed to take it seriously?

The Play Drive

In 1794, the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote that the human being “is only fully a human being when he plays”. Not when he works. Not when he achieves. When he plays.

Schiller believed we are pulled between two forces – the part of us governed by need, urgency and sensation, and the part of us governed by order, reason and form. And he argued that there is a third thing, a place where those two are reconciled, and he called it the Spieltrieb, the play drive.

The play drive is where, he says, freedom lives. It is the state in which we are neither driven by appetite nor constrained by duty but are moving freely for the sheer aliveness of it.

Making Everything Useful

Yet look at how we live. We have made almost everything we do useful, justified, and/or productive. We exercise to burn calories, we rest to be more efficient, we even approach our own wellbeing as a project to optimise, and in doing so, we forget how to do things simply because they make us feel alive.

I notice this most in the people I work with and often in myself. The forgotten capacity to do something for no reason at all. To paint without inhibition of a perfect outcome. To move without counting the steps, the reps, or the weight lifted. To follow a thought down a winding path with no outcome or to solve a problem. To cook something just because the colours or flavours please us. The play drive doesn’t ask whether the thing is worthwhile. It asks whether it makes us feel free.

So perhaps it is worth asking yourself: when did you last do something purely for the fun of it? Not to improve, not to achieve, not to post on social media about, but simply because it was enjoyable?

There is something here that matters deeply for wellbeing. A life arranged entirely around usefulness is exhausting, because nothing is ever allowed to simply be. We become human doings rather than human beings, a phrase I am sure you are familiar with. And the antidote is not more rest in the sense of collapse; it is play, in Schiller’s sense. The free, purposeless, alive expression of who we are when nothing is being demanded of us.

Play And Coaching

Play is also, I have come to believe, one of the most underrated qualities in a truly effective coach. This is because so much of coaching involves helping someone loosen the grip of the “shoulds” and the duties and demands that have quietly squeezed the aliveness out of their life. A skilled coach can hold a space playfully so a person remembers what it feels like to want something freely again, rather than dutifully. There is real craft in that, and real joy in holding it and watching someone rediscover their playful self.

A Small Experiment

  • Do one thing, however brief, with no purpose other than the doing of it. 
  • Notice if you experience resistance, a voice that says the activity is a waste of time and that you should be productive. 
  • Notice what happens when you acknowledge your resistance and continue to lose yourself in play.
  • Notice how you feel after you finish playing, e.g., free, relaxed, alive, content.

Analysing your play may seem at odds with the idea of purposeless play, but perhaps in noticing the benefits play can bring, we might step more fully into the fullest expression of ourselves.  

If reading this made you consider living more freely or helping others do the same, our Health and Wellbeing Coach Training explores the art of holding space where real change and aliveness can happen.

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