Learning to Play

Bad sleep lately.  Many intense dreams and much yelling, multiple times during the nights. Combined with the pain from the arthritis and bursitis in my hips and the tossing and turning that leads to, my sleep is severely disrupted.  And I do love to sleep, so that really sucks.  

I dreamed during my nap this afternoon that Grizzly Adams came to visit my dad.  In the dream I argued with my mom (I was an adolescent, she was an adult) about our meal schedule.  She was timing it so that I'd have to make lasagna from scratch on a day when I'd taught two classes and had office hours.  Crazy what kinds of things the sleeping brain can come up with.  [Aside:  perhaps non-coincidentally, since M. has grown out his hair and beard, he looks a hell of a lot like the t.v. series version of Grizzly Adams.]  

Against this background of sleep deprivation, I've been struggling with feelings of obligation to write a novel or non-fiction book.  One of my intentions on moving to New Mexico was to have more mental space and more time to devote to working on the writing projects that I've placed on the back burner over the last three years.  I have a half-completed science fiction novel as well as the majority of the text for an academic book about re-visioning public education.  I also have about the third of the text for a book about unschooling.  

Recently, I spent a few days actually sitting in front of my computer working on the outline of the public education book, but I found it really impossible to think about the material.   I can't hold enough of the arguments in my head to be able to organize the book, and I keep getting off track switching between work on the general outline of the arguments and work on individual arguments.  I know that I'm a very visual thinker and learner so I've sought out an application that helps me with this (Scrivener).  This allows me to record my ideas on electronic note cards and to then move them around and organize them in an electronic binder and bulletin board.  I find this very helpful, but even that's not enough.  I find myself descending into a cognitive fog. I don't know if this is normal. 

To some degree, I'm sure it is.  It makes sense that it would be difficult to remember and organize complicated arguments.  But I have this idea that I'm having a harder time than normal.  This problem and the associated worry are not new things;  the degree of cognitive confusion I experience when thinking about complicated ideas was an early indicator that something was wrong with my body, and one of the original reasons I went to see a psychiatrist; I ultimately ended up at a neurologist and with the diagnosis of demyelinating disease of the central nervous system.  In simple terms, I have scar tissue in my brain likely from some old infection, and this affects the ability of my brain to communicate signals across the neurons.  This can lead to excessive sleep disorders, fatigue, and mental confusion.  But it's hard to tell how much can be attributed to a brain disorder, how much to inadequately developed working habits, and how much to simple laziness.  

One major thing I'm re-examining over the last year is all the 'oughts' that I became aware of within my thinking.  Even though I consider myself a fairly reflective person by nature and profession, and someone who is very well informed about the influence of culture and habit on the patterns of individual thinking and behavior, I cam to realize that much of my day-to-day activity was structured by a collection of deeply held beliefs about what I ought to be doing.  More and more, I came to realize that there were persuasive arguments challenging these beliefs, arguments that I had been trying to suppress because if I took them seriously they would require me to structure my life in very different ways.  

Moving to New Mexico was the outcome of taking these arguments seriously.  But even though that move was an outcome of challenging and then rejecting certain of my beliefs, many of the beliefs continue to exert influence over what I think about the world and myself, and how I behave.  In other words, it's those beliefs that continue to whisper to me every day about what I should be doing.  I think it's worthwhile to ferret out those voices and take a critical look at them.  

For example, one of my deepest and most unexamined beliefs is that I should be a writer and/or an artist, that this is my destiny.  I can't remember a time when I didn't think I ought to be or was supposed to a writer or an artist.  What was this should based on?  Several things. First, like most young children I liked to draw a lot.  And my parents were nice to me; they praised me when I drew the same damn picture over and over of our house (with a single window and a door, and a chimney with a curl of smoke coming out), with the obligatory apple tree in the yard, a smiling sun, and of course, a rainbow and few clouds.  Sometimes I got very creative and added a hole in the tree for an owl to live in, and added a few v's to the sky to represent birds.  I also drew lots of flowers that looked nothing like real flowers.  "She's such an artist," my mom would say to everyone.

I wrote a few short stories before the age of ten, too.  I remember thinking a lot about plots for novels and short stories, but at that point my experience was so limited that I really couldn't imagine anything with much richness.  Nevertheless, I got lots of praise for being a writer.  I recall that once my mom presented one of my short stories to a writer friend she knew.  I recall my mom trying to tell me what the writer thought of the story (which was about a child's weekend trip to her grandparents' farm):  "Um, she thought it was a little too positive to be realistic."  Today, I feel really sorry for the writer-friend for having to tactfully tell my mom that I wasn't yet ready to write serious fiction.

What I did do well all throughout school and college was read.  Somehow from this, I concluded that I should be a writer.  Makes a certain amount of sense; since I spent so much of my time with my nose buried in a book (both of my parents called me 'the reader' in not entirely affectionate tones since I was skilled at hiding in the woods with books whenever there were chores to be done), surely as an adult I would surely want to be involved with books.  

And that's true, I do read a lot.  But being a good reader and enjoying reading, and being a good writer are two very different things.  Being a good reader involves a different skill set than being a good writer.  And enjoying reading doesn't mean I would enjoy writing or be good at it.   

And really, it's not even that I enjoy the process of reading all that much.  In fact, I find it difficult to sit down and read for any length of time.   What I enjoy most is pursuing puzzles that involve making sense of new and old information.  But that's a completely different thing from writing about them in order to communicate about the process of solving the problem or to share the outcomes with others.  

But I continue to feel as if I ought to write.  Some of this is that I do value the process of writing because it helps me to clarify my own thinking; I also recognize the value of writing as a means of communicating ideas to others.   But even here is one of the beliefs that I found myself challenging:  I have no faith that any of the academic papers that I wrote over the years or presented at conferences influenced anyone's thinking in a significant way.  

Yet I feel compelled to write in a way that goes beyond the urge to write for my own purposes, the writing i want to do in order to clarify my thinking.  I feel like I should write.  

Really, why should I?  I used to think that writing or other forms of artistic expression, because they involve the expression of ideas and aesthetic sensibilities,  were the holy of holies.  I used to think the same thing about teaching, for similar reasons.  But really, are teaching, writing, and other forms of expression really that different from other kinds of things that we consider to be (merely) jobs?  Who benefits from these beliefs, from me and others having this internal voice that tells us what we should do with respect to how we spend our time [Note: in this context, I'm not asking these questions about the moral voice that tells us things such as we shouldn't kill others.]

My temperament has a bit of an anti-authoritarian streak, to put it lightly.  So when I become aware of hat voice in my head telling me I should do something, my impulse is to say, "Fuck you!"  But I think beyond that immediate impulse there are good reasons to be suspicious of the voice in me that tells me that I should write.  

Awhile back I read a thought-provoking essay by Bob Black, originally published in 1985, entitled "The Abolition of Work."  Full text is available for free here: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm.  

Black writes,

No one should ever work.  

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or living in a world designed for work.  In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working,  

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things.  It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution.  By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art.  There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is.  I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.  Play isn't passive.  Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced  exhaustion nearly all of us [will] want [to] act.

There's a lot in the essay and I won't get into Black's entire argument about the nature of work here, but I do want to pull out the distinction he makes between 'work' and 'play' because it's useful in helping me to think about what stance I might take toward the 'ought'    in my own thinking about writing.  

According to Black, work is something we do because we believe we have to do it, we should do it, for various reasons.  It's forced activity.  While we might occasionally experience joy while we're working, the joy is not intrinsic to the activity, and it's not why we chose to or continue to engage in the activity. 

"Work is the opposite," according to Black.

Play is always voluntary.  What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced.

It's important to note that the distinction between work and play here is not that work accomplishes something and play does not, or that play is always enjoyable while work is not. Rather it's that work, because it's forced and because our entire culture is structured around work and working, comes to be associated with that internal voice telling us what we should be doing, how we should be spending our time.  A very large part of our identity becomes what kind of work we do, what kind of worker we are.  Think of the question asked of all young children:  "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  Or one of the very first questions we ask someone when we meet them for the first time, "What do you do?"  

The expected answers about what we want to be or what we do are about the worker we want to be, the kind of work we do.   Imagine if child responded, "Well, I want to be a happy person who is free to do what I want to do."  Or if an adult said, "I take long walks in the mountains with my dog, I laugh a lot with my family, I bake really good chocolate cakes that my wife loves, and I think about the meaning of life."  

In the answers of both the child and the adult here, we see that they are doing things and are being someone, but the answers are wrong because they don't focus on the work that a person does or the kind of worker that a person is.  The answers are about what they choose to do, not what they're forced to do.

This distinction between work and play is useful to me when I think about myself and writing.  I'm at a point in my life right now where I'm questioning how I ought to live and what I previously believed.  Given a choice (and that's a big if, I know), I want to do things  because I want to do them, because I find some value in doing them, not because I believe I'm forced to do them or I believe I ought to do them.  I want to write because I find some value in it, not because being a writer fits with some image of what others thought I would be when I grew up, not because in my profession that's what I'm expected to do.  

Well, what about doing it because I need to do it in order to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach?  This is the topic for another post.  I do want to say that I've come to the conclusion that the belief that I have to work (as opposed to play) in order to accomplish those things is seriously mistaken--a mistake that I wish I had come to see much earlier in my life.  Like all of us in this society, and even though I grew up in a back-to-the-land kind of household, I was conditioned to believe that I needed a roof of a certain kind, and food of a certain kind, that others would build that house for me, and provide my food, and I would work in order to secure those goods.  I believed that I had a very limited range of choices and I was constrained into choosing one of those options.  I now see that the choices available to me are much broader than I had imagined and that I am free choose the one I believe best serves the ends and values that I have also chosen for myself.  

For some very cool homes that challenge the current U.S, conception of what a home has to look like, check out The Tiny House blog (http://tinyhouseblog.com/).