Play is the Process of Putting Reality Through Its Paces

Any of us who have spent much time with very young children have had the privilege of observing one of them discover themselves in a mirror. It's confounding to them at first. That other child surprises them by being so close, so suddenly. When they realize it's themselves at whom they are looking, that there is no other child inside the mirror, they are delighted: it's like magic. They are delighted because it's a novelty in their world, and humans have evolved to notice novelty. I suppose there are some children who are at first afraid of their own reflection, but the ones I've observed, are delighted when they realize what is happening. And in their delight, they experiment: making faces, jumping in and out of range, showing it to other people, and generally putting it through its paces (which is why unbreakable mirrors are a good idea in preschool spaces). 

It's a clear example of learning through play. The child, by putting their own hands on it and their own face in it, is engaged in discovery. Their efforts will not likely result in an understanding of why a mirror works, but they will, if allowed their experiments, all learn the basics of how it works. Most of the time, for most of us, that's all we ever need to know about mirrors: they reflect a portion of visual reality. Young children usually don't yet have the vocabulary to describe the phenomenon, but they will nevertheless learn that the "picture" in the mirror changes as their body changes in relation to it. 

This seems so commonplace to us adults that it's hardly worth mentioning, yet it stands at the center of much of the current thinking around the nature of reality: perspective matters.

"To those of us who believe in physics," wrote the great physicist Albert Einstein in 1955, "this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one." He wrote this in a letter to a family of a friend who had just died. One presumes that the great scientist was offering comfort. After all, if time does not flow in a particular direction, then our loved ones are always still with us, just not always at/on the same tract of time that we currently occupy. I don't imagine it offered much solace to those who had lost their loved one, even if Einstein had proven it true by mathematics.

Math, for most of us, offers, at best, cold comfort. It tells us that our loved ones are simply elsewhere in time in the way that they might be elsewhere in space. True, but not useful information. For most of human history, when a loved one travelled hundreds of miles from where we stood, and stayed there, it was the equivalent of losing them into time, to death, except it was into space. In the meantime, we've invented postal systems, telephones, and the internet, all of which allow us to keep in touch even as they occupy a different corner of space than we do. We've invented trains and cars and airplanes that can take us to where they are or bring them back to us with relative ease. We haven't invented a technology for communicating or traveling through time, so, as "children of time," as physicist Carol Rovelli puts it, we are stuck with the finality of death no matter what the math tells us.

Rovelli writes, "The time of our thinking is directional because our thinking is itself an irreversible phenomenon. Because we ourselves are irreversible phenomena." Being children of time is a perspective on the universe, an angle on the mirror, that we can't change by moving around in space. To do that, we would need to be able to move around in time, and, like a child discovering how a mirror works, put it through its paces. Sadly, so far, and probably forever, math will be our only way to comprehend this.

"We are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right," writes Rovelli in his book White Holes, "and it is this that prevents us from learning more." What we see when we commit ourselves to observing young children, as opposed to "teaching" them, is that they are far less attached to their own self-evident rightness. Perhaps we adults have concluded that learning is "hard" because we ourselves struggle to overcome our natural intuitions. As we age, we tend to calcify, to take comfort from what we think we know and even to fear things that seems like magic (like our current cultural nervousness about so-called "artificial intelligence"). After all, we've been taught magic doesn't exist, so when we see our face in whatever mirror we are considering, we dig in our heels, reluctant or afraid of upsetting the status quo. That can't be true. It's a trick. I'm being gaslit. In the good old days, you would get roughed up for saying such things. The Earth is obviously flat. 

What children understand better than we do is that when confronted by something new, something novel, something magical, if we are to understand it, we must play with it. Play is how to we discover new perspectives, and it's only through collecting as many perspectives as possible that we can ever approach comprehension about this mirror, or anything else for that matter.

There is a mountain that I can see from my living room window. I spend time every day looking at it. In the morning, I see familiar rocky faces caused by shadows and patches of vegetation. As the sun rises throughout the morning, the first faces are replaced by new faces. If I happen to see the mountain from a perspective other than my living room window, even if I look at it as the sun rises, it shows me different faces. I know, of course, that those faces are creations of my own mind in partnership with my perspective: the mountain does not have faces, yet there they are whenever I look. I once tried to show some of the more obvious faces to my wife. She saw faces, but they were different ones than the ones I was seeing. The awe-inspiring thing is the recognition that all those faces -- hers, mine, everone's -- exist all the time, even if I can't see them.

The great flaw in Western science is that it presumes that there is, ultimately, for everything, everywhere, a "god's perspective," one that sees all of reality objectively. Scientists like Rovelli are investigating the controversial idea that there is no such perspective, that everything is a function of relationships between things, like the relationship that the toddler creates and their mirror. Reality, he writes, "is perhaps nothing other than perspectives."

This is why play, the process of putting reality through its paces, is the most up-to-date and direct way to learn about the world from our unique, if limited and impermanent, perspective.

From the perspective of science, reality is just a bunch of particles and waves that our senses take in and our minds construct into shapes, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes that allows us, as children of time, to better survive.

From the perspective of life itself, however, we have no choice in any given moment but to trust the world our minds have created from the stuff of reality. Education is the process of adding to our perspectives by playing with reality, especially the parts that are novel or look like magic, not through the question of why (which is the domain of science and manufacturing), but rather how. How is the question of life itself. Why leads us to take things apart, to separate them, to try to seek the ever-just-out-of-grasp god's perspective, whereas how leads us to the relationship this object or idea has with ourselves and the rest of the world as we know it. How is the question that allows us to figure out where new perspectives fit with old ones. How makes us bigger.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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