Play

My left eyelid is connected to my right earlobe by a mozzarellan string of snot. Sweat hangs on the thin line and drips. Snorting out the contents of one’s nose while leaning horizontally forward at 40kph is hit and miss, but necessary as well-mannered nose blowing requires an extra hand. The soft tape on my handlebars has been replaced with sandpaper designed for skateboard decks so that my stabilising grip does not slip. Initially uncomfortable, my palms have now thickened with scar tissue and I no longer bleed. I’m pedalling hard on an endless, pristine cycling track and the desert rolls by quickly. Bright sand reflecting the rapidly rising sun. It’s infernally hot. I’m breathing hard. And smiling broadly. 

In front of me a good friend and my grown son are vying for fleeting glory on a short sprint up an unimportant hill under pylon lines that stretch back from the largest solar farm in the world. Behind me two more friends sit in my wake, grinning as they watch the impromptu race. In the distance, across romantically drawn dunes, I can see the farm’s futuristic visitor centre. It lives up to its design brief; ‘Star Wars meets Arabia’. I smell wild, white Oryx before I see the scattered herd. They smell of horse. I’m in the moment and time has lost its value. I have no sense of self-anything. I’m acting without purpose. I’m on my bike, outside and offline, immersed in vitamin D, flora, fauna and fresh air, playing with my friends, and I don’t want this feeling to end. 

‘A Mars a Day helps you work, rest and play’. The advertising jingle for a popular chocolate bar, now shrunken, that ran from the late fifties to the end of the last century. In a time when sugar was not poisonous the strap-line implied three separate, bounded periods. Today most of us seem to have only two and the boundaries have become porous. Work emails infest our rest and non-work electrons poison our work. We carry a smartphone almost everywhere. It’s an indispensable distraction device that ensures that we never really recover and we never truly engage. Soft and hardware designers consort to addict us to time-hungry media and machines, and we willingly add the associated app to the latest ‘phones. Society now overvalues those that undervalue sleep, exhaustion is a status symbol and being ‘busy’ is considered good. This is clearly not working as we are the most obese, depressed and highly medicated generation of humans in history.

Anxiety is Powerlessness multiplied by Uncertainty. We become more certain, perhaps, and wield power through our smartphones. When separated from the phone we worry. The smartphone is here to stay; we can’t uninvent. So how do we temporarily replace it? How can we make ourselves indistractable?

As an athlete I know that physical fitness does not come from working hard. It comes from: consistent sleep closely tied to circadian rhythm; nutritious whole food diets, and; recovery from exercise. We damage ourselves when we train hard, and get stronger when the body repairs the tiny tears that intense exercise causes. Another formula: Stress plus Rest equals Growth. We can apply this to all aspects of our lives. 

For me play is competition, humour and ego-free conversation. It is the ride, the relationships and the coffee house chatter afterwards. It is creative and active. The opposite of play is not work, it is depression. Play is joy. And when you are playing, really playing, you don’t need a phone. The most valuable rest, once we have our sleep hygiene sorted, must be play. Children play to grow and so, even as adults, should we.

How will you play more?

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I put out a weekly version of this Newsletter for those who want it.  If you enjoy this sort of missive, please comment, like it or share it.  Many thanks!

P.S. I was going to call this ‘Adult Play’ until someone with a filter (see ‘grown son’ above) pointed out that no one would want to share an article of that name. But you know what I mean. Just don’t google it (AI will get the wrong end of the stick).