The play of life

GAMES, sports, playtime, fun, jokes always play an important part of our life. We need to give them some serious scrutiny to see that everything is done properly.

We often take them for granted, and thus we often fail to imbue them with the proper spirit and purpose, and so we get their bad, even disastrous effects, instead of their great potentials for our own good.

Playing is a human necessity. It comes spontaneously to children. Their sense of wonder and discovery, plus their bursting reserve of fresh energy, just make them do it. They enjoy it tremendously, and their learning and growing processes get tied up with fun. They don’t even realize they have learned and grown so much just by playing.

Every time I see children play, I can’t help but get amused and deeply moved as I see the joy visibly printed on their faces and the many invisible but somehow discernible good things taking place in their inchoate, rudimentary life.

When playing, children are sowing the seeds of many virtues and good values that will serve them well all throughout life—friendship, teamwork, sociability, respect for others, flexibility, etc. Let’s hope that they continue to nourish these virtues and values all throughout their life.

That’s why we, adults, need to play too. For one, play makes us rest and relax from our usual work. It refreshes us and makes us recover our good spirit. It helps us fill up our free time. It can even have a cathartic effect, since it frees the mind and heart from whatever tension and worry we may have.

It has tremendous powers to dissolve or sublimate our anxieties and preoccupations. It helps us to move on, extricating us from any dead-end we can get into. It’s always good that we incorporate play in our daily schedule. Yes, we have to pray, but we also need to play, otherwise we can get rigid.

Playing helps us avoid getting confined to our own world. It always connects us with others, and therefore checks our tendency to be overly introverted and self-absorbed. It helps us fight against idleness and the many temptations that usually come with a stagnant mind.

That’s why we need to see to it that our play should always involve others. We have to be wary of playing by ourselves, a phenomenon that’s getting more common because of our new technologies that favor and encourage it. We have to fight against this trend that’s afflicting a great number of the population, especially the young.

Playing is a great teacher in the proper and healthy sense of competition. It enhances one’s performance in work and any endeavor. We need this to get ahead, to progress and develop personally and socially. A man with no sense of competition often lags behind in life.

Playing also teaches us to cope with any fate that can come to us—whether we go up and get rich or we go down and become poor. This is important, because life is full of things beyond our control. And yet in spite of that reality, we still can manage to keep our dignity and afford to be cheerful and optimistic, whether we win or lose.

It’s good not only to our physical health but also to our mental health. In fact, it is also good to our spiritual and moral health. A playful and sporty person tends to get into easy and abiding relation with God and with others. It makes him open, transparent, likeable.

Whatever defects we have are easily softened when we are sport. Being playful and gamey gives charm to a person. That’s why I have seen many men who otherwise are not attractive physically managing to have great appeal to women simply because of being sporty.

We just have to make sure that we imbue our sports, games and play with the proper spirit. The danger often comes in the area of professional sports where things can tend to be done to extreme. It’s as if winning is the be-all and end-all of life.

Sports and games are meant mainly for fun. Winning is just secondary. We can always learn good things from them if we do and pursue them with the proper dispositions.

We should do them always in the context of charity, and never simply self-affirmation and assertion. We have to learn to convert them into prayer, playing them in God’s presence, and ever mindful of the conditions of the others. They should never occasion hatred, anger and envy.