To Weave Our Selves Into the Fabric of Life Itself

Time has passed over me," she thought, trying to collect herself; "this is the oncome of middle age. How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors -- as I do now," here she stepped onto the pavement of Oxford Street, "what is that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. ~Virginia Woolf, Orlando

We tend to think of our selves as discrete dots of life amongst the other dots of life, existing along an inevitable arc of birth, living, and death as independent beings that exist for a moment and are gone. Yet with every inhalation we draw the rest of the world into us -- pollens, spores, gasses, and all those microscopic bits and pieces that we call dust. With every exhale we spread ourselves out into the world. Our senses are in a constant state of taking in and our bodies are in a constant state of giving out until it's hardly possible to really know where we end and the world begins. 

Is it any wonder that our minds are the same way. 

There are days in the preschool that can only be credited to the workings of a hive mind, projects woven or built from the raw material of "I have an idea!" and "Let's make a bad guy trap!" and "Yes, and I'll be your little sister!" We see it with bees and ants, we understand an aspen grove as a single root with tens of thousands of stems, but we often fail to see the awe inspiring, interconnected beauty of our own species at its best.

We see it most clearly in children's play, when the adults get out of their way. We see it when one child places a wooden plank over a log to make a lever or seesaw or kind of catapult to launch small objects into the air. Then, instantly, they all know about levers or seesaws or catapults. Our habit of thinking ourselves discrete makes us credit the first child while labeling the others as imitators and tagalongs. It's the same bad habit that causes us to make them stop playing so we can judge them through tests and with grades. We literally miss the forest (or the root system) for the trees.

As adults, we have forgotten the vast majority of what we were taught in school, but we remember our friends, we remember the ideas and things that had personal meaning, and we remember our play. Of course, we "remember" much more than what we can at any given moment recall, but it takes someone to light a pink candle in order for us to again see a girl in Russian trousers. It's a memory we've stored externally and is accessible only through the lighting of pink candles. Young children have fewer memories than those of us who are middle aged, but as they play, they are connecting their minds, their selves, with people, places, and things: inhaling and exhaling, hearing and being heard, seeing and being seen, smelling and being smelt, tasting and being tasted, feeling and being felt.

Psychologist Karl Groos wrote, "(T)he animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play." The past several decades has seen a dramatic decline in childhood play. Compared to children in the 1970's, unstructured outdoor play has fallen by more than 50 percent. It's probably not an accident that we are today confronted by a rapidly spreading, and extremely dangerous, epidemic of loneliness. Through play, we become larger, not because we are individual, but because we are integral.

The 19th century philosopher Hegel went so far as so propose that our perception of individual objects and people is an illusion and that the only real thing is the whole, or what he called the Absolute.

We have a period of youth because we must play and we play in large measure not to learn or to grow or to conquer, but rather to connect: to weave our selves into the fabric of life itself, the Absolute, to become an aspect of the hive mind, to inhale and to exhale through time and space and people.

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