Flying high (like a bird in the sky)

This is why we should play

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

Yesterday morning, I went for a run. Well, more of a trot, to be honest, but let’s be kind and call it a run. For weeks after the virus I had in March I felt too weak to run and then we were in Italy, and it rained, and only a mad woman would run in the rain, and anywhere we’re on a hill and I don’t do hills, or at least I don’t do hills for running. Yesterday, I woke at 6.30am, still on a central European body clock, and found myself surprising Anthony (and me) by throwing on leggings, trainers and a hoodie.

I decided to treat myself to a podcast that wasn’t the news, because I’m sick of feeling sick and the news is currently making me feel very sick indeed. Instead, I listened to a psychotherapist talk about “internal family systems and parts work”. He mentioned Donald Trump, because there’s barely a conversation in the world without some mention of Donald Trump, and he mentioned his terrible father and his terrible childhood, and I tried to feel a tiny flicker of compassion, but I didn’t.

The nice thing about running, or trotting, or walking, is that there are plenty of things to look at as you move your body and limbs. It always cheers me up to see the efforts people make to brighten up the urban landscape: pots of daffodils perched in front of dustbins or, say, a window box of tulips. And when I hit the patch of grass that leads to the park that leads to the canal, I feel my spirits rise.

I love the city. I love the sense of humans living in layers like a bee-hive, in an organism that we have all built and all feed. I love looking at the different kinds of houses and wondering what they have seen. But what I really, really love is a park. People behave differently in a park. I think when our eyes move from grey to green, something deep inside us thinks we can let go. We can pause now. We can breathe.

I looked at the boys, sauntering in their school blazers, with that set to the shoulders that seemed to say: we are here and we own this place and we are cool. I looked at the dog walkers, big men with faces full of gruff love. As I crossed the footbridge over the canal, I noticed a cat on the prow of a narrow boat. The cat was propped against the edge of the boat, gazing out at the passersby. Gazing out at me. I am, as my friends with cats know, no cat lover. I’ve learnt that it’s true that if you treat ’em mean, or at least with indifference, it keeps ’em keen. But we had a moment of communion. I am almost sure that that cat saw my soul.

Cat communion.

A few minutes later, I saw a swan asleep on its nest. I was half-waiting for it to spring up and break my arm, since one of the few things I learnt about swans as a child is that they’re strong enough to break your arm. It didn’t. It just snoozed away. I wondered what it was dreaming about. I wondered, for example, whether it ever wakes up in a cold sweat after finding itself on a huge stage, having to give a speech it hasn’t prepared. As it blinks in the sunlight, does it feel its little heart pounding as it realises that it hasn’t also lost its handbag/phone/keys? Looking at that white form, curled up on its home-made raft, I decided it probably doesn’t. It looked so serene. Swan-like, in fact.

The swan-like swan

I passed the café where, a few weeks ago, I had my first proper breakfast after being ill. I passed the playground. Every time I pass a playground I want to play on it. I never do because playgrounds are for children and I am 61. But there were no children on this playground. There were no adults watching this playground. I wandered towards the swings, sat down on one - and swung.

For a moment, I felt I was flying. Flying high, high, like a bird in the sky, as Abba sang, an eagle that rides on the breeze. Like the eagle that was soaring over the valley in Umbria last week.

A man with a huge dog arrived and I half-smiled, half-grimaced as I wrested my buttocks from the seat designed for a child. As I strode back to the footpath up the hill, I felt different. Freer. Lighter. And intrigued that I could get this feeling just by climbing on a swing.

As a child, I loved playgrounds. I still have a scar on my forehead from when I fell off the slide at nursery school. I loved fun fairs, too. I loved the feeling of defying gravity. I loved whizzing and gliding and climbing and plunging. I loved the anticipation and the exhilaration and the sense of adventure. That’s what I really loved. The sense of adventure.

I have not been short of adventures in my life. Some of them I could have done without, but I have survived them, thank goodness, and my adrenal glands still seem to be relatively intact.

The world is also not short of adventures, with an adrenalin addict in the White House who sees the whole world as a giant playground he is trying to smash up.

I am not keen on that kind of adventure. And I am forcing myself not to write about it this week because I do not want my brain, life and Substack to be entirely taken over by a man who is trying to inflict on the world the kind of pain his father inflicted on him.

I don’t want any more big upheavals in my life. (Which doesn’t, of course, mean I won’t get them.) But I do think I could, we could, or most of us could, do with a bit more play. The news is grim and life can feel like an endless to-do list. On “good”, productive days, you work doggedly through it. Tick. Tick. Tick. On “bad”, unproductive days, you don’t and then feel haunted by the lengthening list. (I met a comedian last year who came up with a sketch based on a to-do list that had turned into a living organism that was gradually taking over her flat. Needless to say, it struck a chord.)

If you do things that feel a bit work-y that aren’t on your list, you add them to the list after you’ve done them and then give them a giant tick. (Or maybe that’s just me.) On Wednesday, I spent half the day in password hell, after spending what felt like half the previous day with an app called “Clean My Mac”. It seems to have cleaned it of everything useful and locked me out of all the things I use all the time. And I’m a cybercriminal’s dream! God knows what it would have been like if I hadn’t had variations of the same easy-to-guess password for practically everything.

Perhaps there are people on this planet who love admin. If so, lucky them. I hate it. I struggle to keep up with all the emails, WhatsApps and direct messages on the various platforms the techbros have invented to rule the world. I would happily talk to the people I want to talk to with cocoa tins and string. As a long-term freelancer, I don’t have an enforced routine. But I still find that the process/duty/admin side of life can grind me down. I would say, in fact, that there is never quite enough mindless, pointless fun.

Play, according to the Oxford English dictionary, is to “engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose”. It’s kicking a ball in a park, without taking part in an actual game and with no need or desire to win. It’s dancing for the kick and not for the exercise. It’s clambering onto a child’s swing and feeling like a bird. It’s the thing that sets your spirit free and brings you back into the mind of a child. Ooh, look, I can try this thing! Let’s see where it leads!

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

All art starts with play. All creativity starts with it. And I am not talking about the ghastly Lego exercise I once had to take part in as a member of a charity board. True creativity is more like a sandpit. You dig around. You mess around. You kick some sand around. You see what sticks. And then, with that kernel of something, you can set out on your muddy path.

In my last year at The Independent, in the new (and not much fun) regime, the editor wanted to know the headline of every column before it was written. (Not word for word, but the gist.) That may be a reasonable request, but it’s just not how I write. I had to try, because it was my job, but for me it was join-the-dots. I have always taken the view that if you know what you’re going to write, there isn’t any point in writing it. As Joan Didion said, “I write to find out entirely what I’m thinking.” I don’t like writing that takes you on a firm path from A to B. I like writing that feels like a trot round the park.

Imagine if we all knew exactly where we were going. Count me out, is all I can say. Maybe we are all going to hell in a handcart. We might be. We might not be. That’s the thrill and challenge of being alive. Let’s all relish the freedom we have to wander, amble, commune with a cat, dream with a swan and get a tiny glimpse of what it’s like to be an eagle.

I would love to hear what you do to “play”. What role does it play in your life? And if you’re a writer or artist, at what point does the play turn into something else? I really do want this Substack to feel like a café where we can actually have a conversation, and will respond to all comments.

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