That's What it Means to Flourish

It took her awhile to get going. For the longest time she stood against her mother's knee, watching the other children as they made their way around the space. At one point a fellow toddler took an interest in her. It seemed as if he had forgotten that he clutched small, wooden vehicle in each hand when he impulsively reached out to her, but by the time his hand was in her face, he was handing her a car which she took into her own hands. 

As the boy continued making his way around the classroom, the girl dropped into a squat at her mother's feet and gave the car a push across the floor. She crawled to where it came to a stop, then pushed it again, then again, until she was halfway across the room from her mother. From there she discovered play dough, then finger painting, then the soapy water in our sensory table. For a time she went back and forth between the paint and the water, dirtying, then washing her hands in a classic turn-it-on-turn-it-off cycle. When children do this, I always find myself humming Tom Hunter's song:

Build it up

And knock it down

And build it up again

Knock it down

And build it up

And knock it down again . . .

It was the first week for these two-year-olds and they were all, according to their individual lights, exploring and flourishing as they played.

This is all very familiar to anyone who works with young children. Some researchers distinguish between exploration and play. Exploration, they say, is behavior that asks the question "What is this?" while play asks the questions "What can I do with this?" But the line is so fine, I find it a distinction without a difference.

And that's our prerogative because play -- like love, communication, art, and pretty much any other foundational human experience -- is notoriously difficult to define. Indeed, for play researchers, their results are often dictated by the definition with which they begin, which accounts for the fact that their experiments and studies often produce contradictory results.

In Gordon Burghardt's groundbreaking work The Genesis of Animal Play, he defines play behavior as "non-functional," voluntary, not obviously like the animal's other behaviors, repeated with modifications, and that it only occurs when the animal is well-fed, safe, and healthy. That final condition is an interesting one because it seems to suggest that play emerges only after the first three levels of Abraham Maslow's famous "hierarchy of needs" are met. It's only when the animal feels physically, psychologically, and socially safe that the play instinct emerges. 

I saw that with our little explorer. It was only once she felt secure enough to move away from her mother that her play (or exploration) began. What she did was non-functional, self-selected, unlike her other behavior, and repeated with modifications. In the words of Maslow, she was, with her other needs met, free to satisfy her needs for self-esteem and self-actualization.

This is all well and good, of course. It's the kind of deep thinking and observation that play-based educators do all the time, but to someone not versed in our profession, what this girl was doing -- what all the kids were doing -- probably looked pretty aimless.

Aimlessness is not something our culture values. Our work-hard-to-prosper mindset doesn't leave a lot of room for aimlessness. We dream of the glorious aimlessness of, say, a beach vacation, but struggle with the reality of aimlessness. We might set off on an aimless stroll around the neighborhood, but destinations and errands often steer us. One of my neighbors, a retired gentleman, simply can't go for a walk without also collecting the garbage he comes across along his way. "I might as well be useful," he says. We all find ourselves, at least sometimes, craving the end to schedules, obligations, and the overall tyranny of usefulness, but our cultural training makes it challenging, if not impossible. I'm just going to lounge by the pool, but I'll also file my nails or catch up on my email or check in with mom. And for many off us, moments of true aimlessness are accompanied by feelings of guilt or shame.

Many discover a kind of aimlessness in meditation for a few minutes a day, and it's obviously a re-centering and restorative practice, but it's not the same thing as the aimlessness of play . . . At least according to my own, ever-changing definition.

When I watch children wander from one thing to another, noticing novelty, pausing when their interest is piqued, doing things over-and-over for a minute or an hour, then moving on to something else without being concerned with usefulness, I see behavior that may be tolerated in toddlers, but is often vilified in poplar culture. Aimlessness in adults is often lumped in with laziness. Parents worry that their teenager doesn't seem to have any "direction." We worry that without ambition, without purpose, life will become a wasteland of regrets and broken dreams.  Aimlessness looks like self-indulgence, even as we crave our own leisure.

In her book Flourish, philosopher and publisher Antonia Case writes, "(T)he habits bred into us by the modern world have left us unable to enjoy leisure properly. We’re either working, preparing for work, commuting to work or recharging our batteries for another round of work. Otherwise, we’re just zoning out in front of a screen. What’s more . . . many of the activities that we deem to be leisure are in fact just another version of toil. Jogging to lose weight, hosting parties in order to "netowork,” learning yoga to be an instructor — these activities are undertaken instrumentally, with a specific goal in mind. Leisure, on the other hand, is done for nothing other than the sheer joy of immersion."

Greek philosopher Epicurus said, "It's not what we have, but what we enjoy that constitutes our abundance."

We live in an era that can be characterized as a dictatorship of productivity, which means that many of us spend our days doing things we don't enjoy. It's always what people come up with when they criticize play-based childhoods: how will the children learn to do the things they don't want to do? In fact, pretty much everything that happens in normal school is predicted on the idea that children won't want to do it. That's why we have so many educators who feel that their main job is controlling the kids. This doesn't make anyone feel happy or abundant.

Our modern mythology tells us that accomplishment, power, and stuff will bring us happiness, but as any toddler knows, it's enjoyment that does that. Pleasure. "The more time you spend attending to the things that make you happy, the happier you will be," writes behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, "Change what you do, not what you think." As every psychologist knows, what we focus on grows. As every toddler knows, aimless doing, playing, is how we discover joy. When I ask parents what they most want for their toddlers, the answer is usually something like, "I just want them to be happy." They mean it, but when I did a little deeper, I usually discover that what they mean is that they want their children to flourish.

Case asks, "Is this the secret to flourishing? To set one's sights beyond the self, to the world around us? While yogis and mindfulness experts may do this by focusing attention on the breath and the immediacy of the moment, a similar approach, but one that is no les effective, is to focus attention on objects and ideas and subjects that interest us, to be attentive to those who are our immediate space, allowing us to escape the empire of self . . . To be utterly absorbed in the external environment is an act of self-denial to be sure, but one without the moralistic overtones."

Looked at this way, looked at from the perspective of our toddlers, we see that aimlessness, contrary to our ideas of it being some sort of failure, moral or otherwise, is in fact how we care for ourselves. It is how we discover what gives us joy, and it's there that we ultimately find our purpose in life. Our myths tell us that we must set goals, but how can we know that the person we will become in the interim will find those goals worthwhile? Unless our goals are immediately achieved, we often find that by the time we attain them they no longer bring us joy. 

It's a cultural sacrilege to think this way, but my toddler friends seem to know that aimlessness, or authentic play, is to be valued above all. It is the top of the pyramid where self-actualization resides. It is the surest, albeit wandering, path to a life of delight, pleasure, leisure, joy, purpose. That's what it means to flourish. And this is, to me, is what education should be all about.

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