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    (Edit 9/24: adjustment to thread title)

    Was recently thinking about the play/work dichotomy, and how sometimes (perhaps if one is lucky) the line between them is blurred. And where the concept of “inspiration” might be relevant. Thinking about inspiration, play, and work opens the door to Art. Art in its almost endless forms and manifestations seems to exist in that zone between work and play. Art in general seems to take the serious work of existing as a human full-circle and includes playful games in this life-and-death affair, while not denying the seriousness. For instance, the walking and movement of life becomes a dance. The speaking and verbal communication becomes poetry and songs. Preparing of food becomes cuisine... on and on...

    One could take the seemingly unstructured play of a child as one extreme, and the paid labor that constitutes the job of an adult on the other pole. If the play is a little more organized it could take shape as a game. A paid job or career is a small subset consisting of all the acts of work one does. On a molecular level, almost every action could be considered to be a work of some kind. And the job itself can be broken down into many actions.

    Could some sort of primal art, the art of being human, lie between work and play? Is there some rough continuum? Like Play - Game - Art - Craft - Work - Job... ? Is it possible to be serious, diligent, and earnest as a worker, while being playful without contradicting oneself? As a small example, people often have music playing in the background while at work. Could that be a small inspiration to subconsciously feel the rhythm, movement, and harmonies while in the midst of mentally and physically challenging work? What of the spiritual practice and motto of ora et labora (prayer and work)? Does the Daoist concept of wu wei (non-action in the center of action), or the Hindu idea of lila (divine play) relate in some way?

    Some relevant quotes come to mind: “Play is a child’s work” - Alfred Adler and others.
    “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration” — Thomas Edison
    “Work without love is slavery” - Mother Theresa
    “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” — Jesus
    “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” ― George Carlin
    “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” ― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
    “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
    ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
    “Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.” ― Madeleine L'Engle
    “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.”
    —François-René de Chateaubriand
    A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look... The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize... I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works... To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. (Oscar Wilde)
    “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” —Stanley Kubrick
    “All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.” —Paul Laurence Dunbar
    “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy... and Jill a wealthy widow.” —Evan Esar

    Thoughts?
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    The mental approach to work and play can have a yin/yang aspect to it. When I find that some work I’m doing is getting to be like drudgery, making a game or puzzle out of it seems to ease things along. Driving long distances seems to flow better by playing little games, like “where’s the problem?” (determining upcoming risk situations, like the motorcycle going 120 mph sneaking up on you) and “find the bubble” (slowing down or speeding up to find the pocket of empty space on the freeway). And if there is some play activity that needs firming up with a little dignity, calling it “work” can make it seem less frivolous. Like “I’m working on a song” or “I’m planning to build my stamp collection”. Ok, maybe not that last one so much! :yum:
  • All sight
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    I think that what characterizes play, is its non-commitment. It isn't serious. It isn't true. I'm pretending, experimenting, trying things out. It is a precursor to seriousness, commitment, truth, and following things through. It isn't work because it isn't fun, but because it isn't significant. If it's meaningful, makes a difference, you really believe in it, and are genuinely committed, then you won't be able to stop working, and it will be much more engaging, or enthralling than fun or pleasure.
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    I'm pretending, experimenting, trying things out.All sight

    That statement I think I understand and agree with. Nicely put. :up:

    I think that what characterizes play, is its non-commitment. It isn't serious. It isn't true.All sight

    These thoughts and the rest of your post, I’m somewhat more ambivalent about. Play definitely seems to have aspects and appearances of the nonsensical, the non-serious, and non-commitment. I certainly don’t wish to extol Peter Pan by seeking some sort of everlasting childhood. But often (in my experience and observations) there is a type of focus, a certain serious intent, in the play of a child or adult (which we call hobbies or leisure activities). I would agree with the quote from the OP: “Play is the work of a child”. Play gets the mind active and the body moving. Actually, some people’s choice of play activities seems exhausting and draining to me. It seems too much work, like skydiving or mountain climbing or such. But it fits the bill for them, and that’s what matters. If they survive, they’re all the better for it! :grin:

    As a side question for example, what would you call what LeBron James does on the basketball court or Bernadette Peters does on a Broadway stage? Play? Work? Compensated effort? A seriously playful job? Some combination of those? None of the above? And how about the writing that is done on this forum, for instance? Hobby? Story telling? Academics? Other?

    Also, perhaps you are familiar with the concepts of “being in the zone” or “flow”. The Flow idea was expounded by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A summary from Wikipedia:

    In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."[15]

    Csikszentmihalyi characterized nine component states of achieving flow including "challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience".[16] To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.[12]

    One state that Csikszentmihalyi researched was that of the autotelic personality.[16] The autotelic personality is one in which a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding, rather than to achieve external goals.[17] Csikszentmihalyi describes the autotelic personality as a trait possessed by individuals who can learn to enjoy situations that most other people would find miserable.[13][page needed] Research has shown that aspects associated with the autotelic personality include curiosity, persistence, and humility.[18]

    Thanks for your reply!
  • All sight
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    I wouldn't know on an individual basis, I don't think that the activity itself is relevant. I wouldn't characterize art is play, and farming as serious. One can be a serious artist, and non-serious farmer. I wouldn't categorize it by activity, but by orientation, and motivation.

    As for flow... well, why aren't we always like that? Why does it require a high level of stimulation? Can one enter flow state while meditating? Time flies, loss of self-consciousness? Is our natural state to be bored, anticipatory, and self-conscious?

    I don't know much about it though.
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    As for flow... well, why aren't we always like that? Why does it require a high level of stimulation? Can one enter flow state while meditating? Time flies, loss of self-consciousness? Is our natural state to be bored, anticipatory, and self-conscious?All sight

    Darn good (and relevant) questions. :up:

    Why aren’t we always in that state of “flow”? It is probably unlikely that someone in history has lived the majority of their life “in the zone” unless they had some kind of neurotransmitter imbalance and were constantly in a manic state or something. Though I think we could be in that state more often with effort and awareness, not unlike other habits and skills. However, we of course do not live in a bubble. The environment and world around us have an undeniable effect. No, I definitely don’t believe that it is our natural state to be bored, anticipatory, and self-conscious. But we’ve kind of been trained to be that way. When the overall education and job situations are what they are now, one has to swim upstream NOT to be bored, confused, and isolated. Daniel Quinn’s gorilla-philosopher Ishmael considered “captivity” to be his main focus, concluding that humans are captives of a civilizational system that compells them to destroy. Destroy the world as well as a sense of belonging in the world, a sense of meaning. From Ishmael:
    Reveal

    In such places (he went on at last), where animals are simply penned up, they are almost always more thoughtful than their cousins in the wild. This is because even the dimmest of them cannot help but sense that something is very wrong with this style of living. When I say that they are more thoughtful, I don’t mean to imply that they acquire powers of ratiocination. But the tiger you see madly pacing its cage is nevertheless preoccupied with something that a human would certainly recognize as a thought. And this thought is a question: Why? “Why, why, why, why, why, why?” the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, “Why what?” it would be unable to answer you. Nevertheless this question burns like an unquenchable flame in its mind, inflicting a searing pain that does not diminish until the creature lapses into a final lethargy that zookeepers recognize as an irreversible rejection of life. And of course this questioning is something that no tiger does in its normal habitat.

    Before long I too began to ask myself why. Being neurologically far in advance of the tiger, I was able to examine what I meant by the question, at least in a rudimentary way. I remembered a different sort of life, which was, for those who lived it, interesting and pleasant. By contrast, this life was agonizingly boring and never pleasant. Thus, in asking why, I was trying to puzzle out why life should be divided in this way, half of it interesting and pleasant and half of it boring and unpleasant. I had no concept of myself as a captive; it didn’t occur to me that anyone was preventing me from having an interesting and pleasant life. When no answer to my question was forthcoming, I began to consider the differences between the two life-styles. The most fundamental difference was that in Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven’t known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

    I considered the matter of our feeding. Human children dream of a land where the mountains are ice cream and the trees are gingerbread and the stones are bonbons. For a gorilla, Africa is just such a land. Wherever one turns, there is something wonderful to eat. One never thinks, “Oh, I’d better look for some food.” Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absent-mindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it’s like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day. In fact, feeding became feeding for me only at the zoo, where twice daily great masses of tasteless fodder were pitched into our cages.

    Excerpt From
    Ishmael
    Daniel Quinn
    https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ishmael/id420055326?mt=11
    This material may be protected by copyright.
  • All sight
    333


    That is quite moving. Do you suppose that we are in captivity? We see quite readily not only are the animals more thoughtful, but they atrophy, and decay in captivity. I think most easily signified, and recognized as the curled over fins on the killer whales.

    I did not ask those questions with pure curiosity, but with the insinuation that flow being a captivating concept of engagement is perhaps only so in contrast to the depths of its opposites.
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    That is quite moving.All sight

    Yes, Daniel Quinn combined story, idea, history with a sense of urgency and relevance that I’ve not seen much elsewhere. Though I’d love to discover more.

    Do you suppose that we are in captivity?All sight

    I try not to be unbalanced and negative about it to the point where it affects daily life. But, yes. I do think there is a core of thought in our culture that is virus-like or even cancerous. There is a force operating that simply and absolutely acts to consume and infest regardless of its effect on people or the planet. It simply won’t stop of its own accord. It is intentional thought and must be countered with the intentional thought, only stronger. I think some movies and other works of fiction capture this menace and the struggle against it. Like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and The Terminator (original movie).

    But this force is devious and drug-like. Imagine having a cancer that is eating you alive, but is also releasing doses of an opium-like drug within you. That might be enough to make one ignore treatment until it is too late. To go a step further, I’ll propose that there will not be, that there simply CANNOT be, justice and relative equality between people until there is a fundamental change in how our culture views and treats the Earth. If this planet is seen as just raw material for ME Incorporated, the tragedies will continue to worsen. This may be veering into another topic, but it is all interconnected.

    I did not ask those questions with pure curiosity, but with the insinuation that flow being a captivating concept of engagement is perhaps only so in contrast to the depths of its opposites.All sight

    True. Then again having enough water in and of itself probably is not enough to send one into an ecstasy as strong as the pain of dying of thrist. But no ecstasy, nor even simple joy is to be had until the basic need is met. Similar with a productive and playful type of work versus something closer to indentured servitude.

    Thanks for your replies!
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    Sports... kind of a large subject of its own, but I thought it relates here.

    Are sports more play, work, or competition? Is there some kind of ideal balance? How about exercise, fitness, overall health? That seems to be part of the picture, as athletes tend to want to be functioning at the highest physical levels. But one wonders about the damaging effects the more “physical” or “violent” sports have on the participants. If speed, strength, and skill are extolled in a particular sport, what if playing it causes the athlete to almost certainly be damaged and injured? Is reaching for the highest of highs worth it overall if there is a serious toll on the body?

    “Going for the glory/gold” seems to be more of a gambling frame of mind than some kind of sustainable lifestyle. Economics play an undeniable aspect, as the sport is made into a product and entertainment. It is somewhat of a cliche to note the pay discrepancy between a professional athlete and a professor. If there is an imbalance, where and when did things go wrong? Is this the fault of the Ancient Greeks and their idealism and Olympics? :grin: Too much emphasis on winning or money? Are sports the mirror of our culture’s soul?
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    Between play and work is somewhat of a “order from chaos” relationship. Not to idealize or dismiss one side or the other. The finished piece of furniture comes from the raw wood, which of course was first a tree. The raw, the young, the primative, and the chaos... this has the potential and the energy. The civilized, the experienced, the cultured has the finished product and the material. It seems to be some kind of yin and yang balance and cycle to them. The dark Dionysus and the golden Apollo. From a day to a project to a career to a lifetime, each seems to begin with potential and end with some (hopefully) tangible results, knowledge, and experiences. And then begins all over, building on what came before...

    It seems tempting sometimes to over-value the civilized and the the processed over the primative and unprocessed. Too much culture and civilization can seem stifling, dusty, and inflexible. Maybe this is because of time. If the result is order out of chaos, then is order “better” than chaos? Is “chaos” even the best word to use, or is it too loaded with baggage? Like mentioned before, “potential” or “energy” might more accurately reflect the dynamics of the situation, and not favor one side over the other. But likewise, too much rawness and chaos can be a confusing mire.

    The transformational nature is reflected in the plants: from seed to harvest. How can one apprehend and use this dynamic flow of energy and matter?
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