Play is not a break from learning. It is one of the ways God designed us to learn, to connect, and to do our best work.

I have been thinking about play this the last few weeks as I explore, Stuart Brown’s book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Brown spent decades taking “play histories” of people from every walk of life, from prisoners to Nobel laureates. His conclusion is simple and sweeping: we are built for play.

This claim deserves attention from those of us who teach, parent, and lead in a complex world. If play is wired into us, it is not an indulgence we schedule after the real work is done. It may be part of how the real work gets done.

Brown’s most useful insight is that play is defined by what happens inside us, not by what we are doing. He illustrates it with runners. Four people can run the same route: one for pure joy, one to chat with friends, one to hit a fitness goal, one to beat a rival. Outwardly, they are doing the same thing. Inwardly, only some of them are playing.

Brown describes play as absorbing and apparently purposeless. It brings enjoyment. It suspends our self-consciousness and our sense of time. And it makes us want to come back and do it again. When a runner misses a target and feels lousy about it, Brown says, whatever that run was, it was not play. This matters for the classroom and how we engage with our kids in down time. We can call something a “game” and still drain all the play out of it with anxiety, grading, and comparison. And we can teach serious content in a way that invites real absorption. The label on the activity is not the point. The state of the learner is.

Play starts somewhere older than our thinking. Brown draws on neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, who studied play in rats and other animals. Panksepp argued that the drive to play starts in the brain stem, the ancient region that also governs breathing, sleep, and dreaming.

From there, the pathway moves upward:

Brown adds a crucial point: without the emotional link in the middle, what happens is something other than play. The joy is not decoration. It is part of how play works.He gives a lovely example. A two-year-old who starts dancing at a summer band concert is not thinking, “I would like to become a musician.” The pull comes from somewhere older and wordless. Fifteen years later, that same child may be a fine pianist, or simply someone who loves to strum a guitar. The love of music took root in play long before it became a plan.

Brown goes further. He sees the impulse to make art as an outgrowth of the play impulse. Painting, athletics, rhyming, punning, mimicry, and even rearranging the furniture or folding paper airplanes all start as play, which talent and opportunity then nurture. A good movie or novel is play too. Think of walking out of a theater and seeing the ordinary world with fresh eyes.

Play also binds people together. Music, dance, and art at harvest festivals and in worship help communities move as one body. Brown traces this sense of belonging back to childhood social play. Learning to get in sync with a group of kids prepares us for the harder work of living with people who differ from us in style and opinionFor a community of faith, this rings true. Worship is, in part, a shared, wordless entering into something together. When we sing with one voice, we are doing something closer to play than to a lecture.

The most fulfilling work, Brown argues, is almost always a continuation of how we played when we were young. He saw this in the laboratory. When Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin walked him through his lab, Guillemin lit up like a child describing a great discovery. Brown realized that Guillemin and polio researcher Jonas Salk were, in a real sense, playing every day. Their sandbox was simply bigger and more expensive. The same pattern showed up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The engineers JPL found most capable were the ones who had spent their childhood taking apart clocks and cameras and building forts. Their edge did not come from technical drills. It came from doing for work what they had always done for joy. In Brown’s words, “They were still playing.”

For me this is a quiet challenge to the way we often educate and parent. We tend to treat play as something children grow out of on the way to serious work. However, research and observations suggest the opposite. The adults who do serious work best never fully stopped playing.

Brown writes as a scientist, not a believer. However, when you read with the eyes of faith, his findings echo something scripture has said all along: delight is woven into creation by a Creator who delights.

Brown’s runners can teach us something about the spiritual life, too. Two people can pray, serve, or study Scripture side by side, one in joyful communion and the other in anxious performance. The outward act is the same, but the inner posture is not. God is not after our performance. He is inviting us into his delight.

I know you are wondering how this connects to my usual advice about preparing for a complex world. Our kids are inheriting problems no textbook can fully anticipate. They will need flexible minds, creative courage, and the ability to work with people unlike themselves. Brown’s research suggests that play builds all three.

Here is what that might mean in practice:

In a future letter I will explore this idea of play further. For now, here are a few questions to carry into your week and think about how you can bring play to your home with your children.

Source: Stuart Brown with Christopher Vaughan, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (Avery, 2009), pages 60–64.

Thanks for spending this time with me.

See you soon,

Margo

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