What Is Fun?
March 3, 2006 | Life | People & Society
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.)
Comments
We really need to hear this now and then in our fast paced, goal-driven, work-orientated society...
Thank you!
Posted by: Katrina at March 3, 2006 07:37 PM
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