Play, Creativity, and Spiritual Growth

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, Unitarian Universalist

May 4, 2003

How do you play?

I’m not looking for sports, here. They may be your major form of recreation, but sports are a rule-bound activity, and they’re competitive. I’m asking about something you might do by yourself, just for the fun of it, something that invites you to the spirit of a child, open, accepting, adventurous. How do you play?

Now if you came to my office for guidance or conversation about your spiritual search, you might imagine that I’d ask if you follow some spiritual path like meditation, purposeful reading, or journal keeping. You might expect me to ask if praying was important or meaningful in your life.

But what if my first recommendation was that you spend two hours every week, not praying, but playing?
Probably you’d wonder if I were serious. Then you might become very polite: Hmm, that’s interesting, you might say. Play. Well, I never would have thought of that. Thanks. Then you might go home and say, that sounds stupid. Or, I’d never find time for that, even as far away as June I can see I’m never going to have time for that. It’s selfish; it’s silly, and besides it’s too expensive. What are we paying that guy, anyway?

I first encountered this idea six or seven years ago in a book you may have heard me mention before, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Cameron subtitled her book “A Spiritual Guide to Higher Creativity,” and it grows out of her experience as a teacher of blocked creative professionals. One of her two principle tools is called an “artist’s date”: A block of about two hours each week set aside for nurturing your own creative consciousness. Your “inner artist,” she calls it.

My first reaction to this idea was very strong: I am a dignified and serious person. This is silly. I do not play. I don’t have time for that, and besides, how would it look? Then came the second layer of objections, the ones with the deeper ring of truth: What would I do for two hours? It’s not like I can make art that’s worth anything. I’m not creative. I don’t have much imagination. Inner artist? What a silly notion.

Hidden within all of this reaction – resistance, Cameron calls it – are some assumptions about creativity, about ourselves, and about the Universe.

We tend to think that solemnity is equivalent to seriousness. Foolishness is, well, foolish, not important, and certainly not a sign of an adult level of spiritual development. We talk about spiritual disciplines, in the same admiring and slightly awed way we talk about the discipline of an athlete or of an important public figure. It’s as if we think we have to do spiritual situps and pushups in order to get our moral and ethical and imaginative lives into shape. Fun is not spiritual.

I’ve come to believe that in fact play is a profoundly powerful tool, not just for opening blocked streams of creativity, but for opening new possibilities in our spiritual life. I think Cameron’s book should be subtitled “A Creative Path to Higher Spirituality.”

The resistance is lesson one. Just try to put a date into your calendar for a weekly two-hour block with yourself for no purpose but to engage in creative play – and watch how fast you start trying to weasel out of it. One week I was going to take myself out to a matinee of some goofy movie, and I must have invited five different people to join me during the week. That’s against the rules; you’re supposed to go alone. Fortunately, no one could come, because they were all Very Serious People With Things To Do. You’ll catch yourself shaving off fifteen or twenty minutes every other week, or inviting someone along who you’ll be embarrassed to be silly in front of. The time or day will shift around unpredictably, and soon days will start disappearing. You will think this is unique to your complicated, overly scheduled, busy and important life. It isn’t. Everybody does this. It isn’t about how busy we are; it’s about not believing we really deserve the time.

Creativity requires self-respect, and self-respect is fundamental to an inner life that nurtures and enlarges us. So just by setting the time for play aside and facing down the resistance we begin creating a climate for growth. And the resistance offers another hint: The first obstacle to the life of the spirit is not someone else; it’s our own sense of unworthiness. Make the time. You deserve it.

Once you’ve set the time aside, of course, you’re faced with the question of what to do. It’s hard to get over the sense that you’re supposed to be using your time productively, or in some way that educates you or could be explained away respectably if necessary. I went to an art museum for my first one and walked around looking at pictures – very cultured, very sophisticated. Not very playful. The next week I went to the audio library and checked out the first recording in the first five letters of the alphabet and went home and played them in random order until my time was up.

The best play dates are the ones that invite some creativity on your part. Go the drugstore and splurge on the big box of crayons – the four-dollar box. See if you can use every color in one picture. Once I tried not to decide what I was drawing until I’d gotten halfway through the picture. It turned out to be a tree, a really interesting one with a lot of things living in the branches. Over time it became important to me not to know exactly what was going to happen.

Not knowing exactly what’s going to happen is a lesson in trusting the Universe. We are used to telling the Universe exactly what we expect from it and being dissatisfied with anything else. What’s far more likely in most of our lives is that you go into the orchard and shake an apple tree, and a shower of oranges falls on your head. You can complain about the fruit selection, or you can acknowledge that what we’re really responsible for is getting out there and shaking the tree – and making something out of whatever falls.

My practice of “artist dates” didn’t last much beyond the time I spent working with The Artist’s Way. Then a few years ago Leslie, Garner and I started having what we called Friday Fun Night each week, a couple of hours when we would try to play together without rules and without criticism. One of the nights I remember most was just before our wedding, when we fingerpainted flowers on big sheets of paper to decorate the social hall for our reception. I don’t know how recently you might have used fingerpaints, but you have never seen anything as silly as a Very Serious Person trying to approach that task. First there’s the problem of getting your hand in the paint. It’s messy. Then, there you are with a dollop of blue on your hand and you realize you don’t know what you’re making. A flower, right, but what kind? What does it look like? Where are you supposed to put the first mark? I must have reached back and forth between the paper and the pot fifty times before the first splot got on the page. I knew I was going to make a useless mess. I knew it!

Creative play demands that we be willing to let go of the mistaken idea that there are right ways and wrong ways to do everything. As someone once said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” This attitude is in sharp contrast to the understanding many of us learned from our parents, the attitude expressed by the writer Fran Lebowitz when she says, “Do not encourage your child to express himself artistically unless you are George Balanchine’s mother.” Most of us know we are not George Balanchine, so we never give ourselves the encouragement we need to become who we are. What stops us is fear.

The willingness to be a beginner, to take a chance on failing and give up the illusion of perfection is basic to all spiritual disciplines. The act is more important than the artifact. Fear waits in ambush at every turning of our lives’ journeys, ready to derail us from our progress toward a fully realized life. If making a piece of playful art makes us afraid – and believe me, it does! – then how much stronger will the fear be when I’m approaching the decision to become someone’s life partner, or making an important choice about parenting, or a career? Play can begin to teach us how fear is overcome. Make the first mark. The next one will come.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the spiritual practice of playing grows over time, as week after week we approach one set time with the strong intention to be joyful. This is a slow process! You’re likely to be dubious at first, but as the occasions add up we can learn that if we mean to have fun, we probably will. If we expect to be joyful, chances are much better that we might. The mounting evidence, week after week, can begin to convince us that in fact the Universe is responsive – if we go to the well looking for joy, most of the time we will find it. Joy survives our dry spells. Joy survives our failures. Joy survives our losses.

In the world we’re living in today, every one of us needs someplace in our life where we are reassured of the resurgence of joy. It is a survival matter for most human beings to know that joy is still waiting for our invitation even in the worst of times.

One of the most wonderful things about play as a spiritual practice is that profound lessons involving deep changes in our way of being can slip under our radar, since we can fool ourselves into thinking that the stakes are low. Am I feeling fearful of the creative process of throwing a pot? Never mind, don’t worry, go ahead, it’s just playing, I’m only fooling around, give it a try, what can I lose?

It’s a lot harder to convince yourself to move forward in the face of your fear if it’s about something “serious,” like moving to a new city or trying on a new career, or becoming a foster parent. But the practice of moving forward in playful situations in spite of our fears and doubts is habit-forming. Repeatedly reassuring ourselves that the Universe will greet our efforts toward joy with a joyful response can gradually transform our relationship with our own life, preparing us for those situations when it’s a lot harder. And that’s the goal of every personal spiritual discipline.

If you don’t believe me, just try it on. What have you got to lose?

It’s just playing.