THE MEANING OF “PLAYING”

THE MEANING OF "PLAYING"

Written by Robert Brown

I looked up the meaning of the word "play" in the dictionary. According to Lexico, to play means to "engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose."

It's a very appropriate definition, from a very generic point of view and so in this article, I'd love to add more to the significance of PLAY, probably one of the greatest, and now probably one of the most forgotten, actions of human beings.

After 20 years of organizing games and adventures for groups, I feel that this great word and verb carries a very profound and significant meaning.

Playing is a moment of absolute magic. You enter a dimension that is almost esoteric and spiritual the world of elemental beings, elves and fairies. You lose, in some way, the notion of time. You forget about yourself and the circumstances that surround you. It is an absolute state of flow.

When we play, we become energy in motion. Each person plays their own game and creates their own movement, generating a certain chaos but it's a tidy, meaningful chaos.

If we looked at a game from above, and tried to draw or represent that movement, it would look very similar to the circular movement of water flowing down a mountain, or even to the creative forms of flowers and plants.

Playing is an adventure within our soul, mind, and body. It's a disruption to the normality of our lives, because we do it for no reason or purpose that will give us something in return. We play just for the sake and fun of playing we're not searching for anything specific, we just collide with an explosion of fun and joy that seems endless.

Playing brings order to our inner chaos, and there we find the pure awareness of happiness.

Playing is wonderful.