Hiya,

Is play really enough? Is it all it’s really cracked up to be? And even if it is, surely there’s a point where it’s no longer enough?

We talk about play a LOT in this lifestyle, right. For good reason. I’m sure we all have at least some idea of how important it is, developmentally, for children. We don’t stand there watching a four-year-old building a tower out of cushions wondering whether they should be doing something more useful.

But give it a few years, and…well, we might.

The older our children get, especially as they go through their teenage years, the less comfortable we are with ‘play’ being a heavy part of their days. It just seems really hard for us to draw the same developmental positives from the younger years through into the older ones.

And adulthood? Forget it. Play has long been put to bed for a great many of us.

Today, I want to give you something to chew on around this ‘play’ thing. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that spending your entire life playing is going to be everything you ever need. That would just be silly. But I am going to remind you that it’s very, very easy to forget why play is so important, and show you just how valuable it can be at ANY age.

To do this, I’m going to tell you a little story about a man named Richard Feynman.

Feynman was a physicist who went on to win a Nobel Prize, but at the point we’re joining him in the 1940s he was wondering whether he’d ever do anything useful again 😅

He was in his twenties, working as a physics professor at Cornell University, and having a pretty rough time. He’d lost his wife to tuberculosis, and while he was doing a good job teaching, the other part of his work involved investigating questions physicists didn’t yet have answers to. Which he felt totally stuck on. He could help his students understand what was already known, but when it came to working something new out himself he just wasn’t getting anywhere.

Meanwhile, other universities kept offering him jobs, with more money, because they thought he had a promising future. Which sounds encouraging, right, except from his side it felt like...they’re expecting me to do all these wonderful things, and I have nothing. Nothing. If they knew how stuck I am…

So every new offer that came his way just made him feel worse. It got to the point where he described feeling ‘disgusted’ by physics.

And it was at this low point that Freyman had a realisation. Which, in his own words, went like this:

“I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.  When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude.  Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

In other words, he cleared away having to ‘make progress’ and ‘do something useful’ and ‘prove to others he was accomplishing things’ and allllll that baggage we load children up with. Especially as they get older. He gave himself a pretty clean slate. And from that clean slate, something very interesting happened.

That very same week he was having lunch in the university cafeteria, and someone tossed a plate into the air. As it spun and wobbled, he noticed that the Cornell emblem on it seemed to rotate at a different rate from the wobbling.

Interesting. Why is that happening.

He started working through the maths involved - playing with the maths - and found a relationship between how fast the plate spun and how fast it wobbled. But then he wanted to know whether there was a simpler way to understand it. Could he explain what was happening by looking at the forces acting on the plate, without needing all that complicated maths? So he kept going.

Which means, he’d actually got his original answer. But instead of being finished, saying ‘job done’, he wanted to see if he could get to that same answer another way. Understand it a bit better. There was more fun to be had in it. More to play with.

Eventually he took what he’d worked out to his colleague Hans Bethe, who thought it was interesting but wanted to know…ummm…why on earth it was important. Like, what was he doing it for?

“Hah!”, Feynman said.  “There’s no importance whatsoever.  I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”

And he kept going. In his account, the questions about wobbling got him thinking about electrons, which brought him back into the physics problems he’d been working on before the war. He was finding his way into all that serious work again, and…enjoying being there.

Over the next few years he developed a new way of calculating how light and matter interact. Part of his approach involved drawing diagrams to organise what was happening between particles, making some very complicated calculations much easier to work through. By 1949, he was publishing that work so other physicists could use it too. Those drawings became known as Feynman diagrams, and became a standard tool that physicists still use today.

Then, in 1965, sixteen years after those papers were published, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics.

There was a whole lot of work between that spinning plate in the cafeteria and his Nobel Prize. But when Feynman looked back on how he’d got going again, he always came back to that plate. To following something because it interested him, enjoying figuring it out, and letting that lead him into whatever he wanted to explore next. He always came back to play. And he called it that, quite specifically and deliberately.

So before we decide our children should be ‘getting more serious about things now’, or that playing around is nice and all but will never be as important as other things, or that as adults that time of life is over for us, maybe stop a second…

Stop, and remember this grown man who credited some of the most important work of his life to playing.

Talk soon,
Issy.

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