Leave your prayer beads and come outside: The spiritual path of play

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

I have long been drawn to the story of Tenzin Palmo, the English woman who spent years meditating alone in a tiny cave in the Himalayas. She was willing to endure grueling conditions because her mission was of the utmost seriousness: she would unlock the secrets of the Vajrayana and attain enlightenment in this lifetime. She was so driven, so sure of her path that, as a very young woman, she left behind her family, her party clothes, and her lover. She cut her hair, amassed stores of barley flour, yak butter, and firewood. She painstakingly prepared to immerse herself in an inner world where earthly distractions would be at a minimum, and would come almost entirely from nature rather than from human beings or social temptations. Until fairly recently, it this classic story, that of the lone ascetic, that has served as my paradigm of the spiritually serious path.

Not that I have made much effort to follow in the ascetic’s steps. My life has been normal and unremarkable by comparison. I have spent years standing before students and in sleepy meetings with colleagues. I have lived in a quiet, ordinary home, waking to the sound of the garbage truck or a dog licking my face. I have ventured to the co-op and to Costco countless times and crossed busy streets on my way to somewhere or other. I have wended through crowds and sat laughing with friends over beer on the back porch. Yes, my mundane busyness has included a fairly regular practice of meditation and writing, and far more hours of solo time than most people can tolerate. But these “spiritual” habits have never felt like enough. From time to time, the strident voice of my superego has continued to insist that, if I am to realize my spiritual potential, I must get more “serious.” It has warned me that time is running out, and that if I am ever to be a properly spiritual seeker, my life trajectory must fork more sharply away from the worldly, and up towards the austere cave where my bowl of gruel awaits.

But it’s never been a voice I’ve fully trusted, and, over time, it’s become even less credible. At this relatively late point in life, precisely when I might have expected age and opportunity to lead me to become more self-contained and contemplative, I hear a call to play. And the call is intense in a way I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before. Certainly not as a child, at least not that I can remember. Even as a kid, and through much of my adult life, “play” — often in the form of sports— functioned more as a compulsion or bodily release. It was more a way of escaping my life circumstances, in which I largely functioned as a little adult, than of becoming more present. I’m not sure I should call it “play” at all. But the call I hear now is fizzy, light, and full of consciousness, a tugging on my sleeve as I dutifully sit down to meditate, write, or otherwise inspect my inner landscape. This new voice reminds me of the preciousness of this bodily incarnation and calls me to the beach, the woods, the dance floor. It nudges me to choose comedy over drama, banter over debate, and music, music, music. So much glorious music. And, lo and behold, it encourages me to find playmates.

The miracle is that, at this liminal place in my journey, I am actually able to hear this call rather than dismiss it as a likely temptation away from my supposedly heroic spiritual journey. I feel willing to let this voice guide and teach me. And so sometimes I dance when I “should” be meditating. I watch SNL videos or Sarah Silverman or Margaret Cho when I “should” be pondering the nature of reality or writing in my journal. And that I have begun to stretch out towards others with an open heart of agenda-less play may be as rare and sweet as anything I have ever done. I who graduated directly from little adult into bigger adult and have rarely looked back. I have been learning to issue a new invitation. And it is not to try to solve the world’s problems, or even our own, at least not in this moment. It is not to ponder the meaning of life, measure our souls’ progress, or sit and follow our breath. Nope. At this moment, I am a happy to be a failed spiritual seeker who reaches for your hand and urges you to join me in my ambitionless, earthly mediocrity: “Come run with me in the woods. Splash with me in the surf. Drive with me to the Grand Canyon, windows down and radio on.”

Because here’s the thing: “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down.” This may be one of our most “spiritual” assignments, then, because to truly (consciously, mindfully, wholeheartedly) let go and play with one another is to play in and with, life itself. And this may turn out to be our best opportunity to realize that maya is not merely a veil over reality that we must struggle to see through, but that we too exist as part of its flickering play. And so it is that, at this point in my heroic fool’s journey, this is my most pressing question: Can I learn to wrestle and gambol and laugh and laugh, trusting that, although life has its mouth around my hand, it will never bite down harder than I can bear?

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