Jumping Up and Down and Throwing Ourselves to the Ground

Jumping up and down on the bus downtown

We are brash -- we all fall down

We take out our brains

And shake 'em all around

              ~Jim White, Crash Into the Sun

The way the game worked, as far as I could tell, is that an ever-changing cast of children jumped up and down, while some of them periodically threw themselves onto the ground, which was hilarious. As an adult who makes a study of children's play, I saw that it was a connecting game, one that allowed children of various ages and developmental stages who didn't know one another particularly well to get to know one another a little better.

Growing up, I often played impromptu games like this. Dad would, say, bring the family along to a company picnic and while the adults made tedious small talk, the kids would introduce themselves to one another with purposeless games. Maybe it would be rolling down a hill together or playing chase or jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground. This would then, given enough time, typically transform into more sophisticated play that involved sorting ourselves out by age, gender, and temperament in which agreements were made through a process of invitation ("Let's pretend . . .") and bickering ("No, I get to go first!"). As long as we didn't interfere with the grown-up fun, as long as we avoided getting too badly hurt (physically or emotionally), our games would be allowed to evolve in this way until it was time to go home. 

Without fail, I would have learned something new, even if it wasn't particularly useful. But sometimes, that new thing we discovered together -- that game, that cultural reference, that way of being in the world -- would be transformative. 

In his book The Kingdom of Play, David Toomey writes:

Natural selection possess a number of specific and well-defined characteristics. It is, for instance, purposeless. It has no intention, and no objective, and as Darwin averred, it “includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development.” It is provisional. The evolution of any organism is a response to whatever conditions are present at a given place and moment. It is open-ended. The evolution of any organism has no moment of arrival and no end point . . .

This is only one of the ways in which play and natural selection are similar. As Toomey puts it, "(I)f you could distill the process of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play. Alternatively, if you were to choose an evolutionary theory or view of nature for which play might seem to be a model, it would be natural selection."

"We're here on this Earth to fart around," wrote Kurt Vonnegut. And farting around, which is to say playing, is our natural response to the conditions in which we find ourselves. Humans, however, are forever attempting to squelch play, to forbid or at least suppress farting around. We tell our children they must get ready for the future by putting their noses to grindstones. Meanwhile the rest of the universe plays, making "the future" a place we cannot even imagine, even as we will help create it. We've collectively determined that having a clearly defined purpose is morally superior to not having a purpose. We praise those hard-chargers who unswervingly chase their goals, while dismissing the rest as muddling deadbeats. But that, in the scope of time and space, is an anomaly. It's a mean denial of the very essence of life itself, which "in the most fundamental sense, is playful."

We tend to forget that nothing is a finished product. Everything continues to purposelessly evolve at every level -- from the microscopic to the universal -- forever transforming itself; endlessly becoming something new. And it seems that the mechanism for doing that is play.

We cannot steer it. We can only take part, jumping up and down and throwing ourselves to the ground alongside those with whom we find ourselves. And, if we're doing it right, it's hilarious.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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