Dave Pollard: If our job is work, and marriage is work, and recreation is work, when do we have fun?
In nature, children play, breeding adults work, and non-breeding adults do a bit of both. In raven communities, for example, each flock has a breeding pair and a bunch of singles who help protect the breeding pair’s young, search for food, connect with other flocks, and otherwise spend their time doing barrel-rolls on roofs, mid-air cartwheels with their talons entwined with each other, mimicking sounds (brilliantly), and, when they’re alone, singing to themselves…..
The essence of fun and play is imagination — and that is not the same thing as creativity. I think we live in a world of enormous imaginative poverty, not because we’re incapable of imagination, but because we’re badly out of practice….
If we want to relearn how to play, to have real fun — the kind that is delightful and not merely exhilarating — we first need to relearn how to imagine, and practice it. The children and animals can show us how.
Good work with which to engage. (Heh.)