Beyond Blue: John McManamy (That's Me) Talks About Play

My favorite blogger, Therese Borchard of Beyond Blue, recently interviewed me on the topic of play, which she broke down into three pieces, published today:

Five Steps to Having More Fun

Play is Crucial to Good Mental Health

Operating Instructions: This is How You Play

Following is a brief excerpt from that interview:

Question: John, could you outline maybe five steps to help the readers have more fun in their lives?

John: Now there you go, Therese, asking tough questions. Look, I already told you I'm an expert in feeling miserable. Why don't you ask me to share my secrets on getting high scores on your math SATs while you're at it? Geesh - okay-okay-okay. I'm thinking ..

1. - Enjoy the peanut butter. As you can see in the picture, here I am trying to explain to Spock the concept of peanut butter. Spock is telling me that peanut butter is not logical (Cardassian tofu apparently is) which is exactly my point. Forget about the bread. Stick a fork in the jar and go for it.

"Enjoy the peanut butter" is my metaphor for living in the present. It comes from an old Zen parable about savoring strawberries as tigers are about to rip you apart. The present is where life is happening, here, right now.

For lots more, please click the links above or visit Beyond Blue's home page. Therese is a brilliant writer, with great insights and a keen sense of humor. At the same time, she never forgets who she is and the challenges she faces in getting through each day. I can't recommend her blog enough.

Play! Podcast

Play is a vital element in our recovery. So much so, I contend, that if you are not spending at least part of your time acting like a child then getting through adulthood is going to pose a major challenge.

Today I woke up with the bright idea of making a podcast based on my previous four blog pieces on the very vital topic of play. This is my first-ever podcast. It's a fun piece that takes only five minutes. Simply click on the title link to enjoy. Then click the "Back" button on your browser to return here. Enjoy ...

Industrious Drudges of the World Unite: Take Back Our Play!

As you can see from my previous three blogs, I take the subject of play very seriously.

I am one of those rare people who love my work. But I tend to fall into the dangerous trap of confusing work with play. Work - even when it's fun - is all about deadlines and responsibilities and no end of stresses. Play - even serious play - is not.

So what about hobbies? Beneficial, yes, but I tend to engage in mine in "adult" mode. I love to cook, but working a knife with four burners going and something in the oven is not the time to get in touch with my inner child.

Socializing? Getting out with others? Same thing. Adult mode, especially when I'm networking, even when I'm cracking jokes. Certain social norms are in play - or, more accurately, at work. Fart jokes, for instance, are off-limits.

Kicking it up a notch? As in white men dancing? Your honor, I rest my case.

Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," is a metaphor on our increasing social isolation and lack of community - from dwindling civic involvement to not getting together to have fun. Participation in organizations such as PTA is way down, as are bowling leagues.

Is bowling play? Close enough. Well - guess what? - we've just about eliminated it. Hardly anyone bowls in regular groups, anymore. It's as if someone said to us: You're adults now. No more recess.

Oh, and by the way, no more recess for your kids, either. We're gonna turn them all into humorless industrious drudges.

Hmm, child bipolar on the rise, along with ADHD, various conduct disorders, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and obesity. Could there be a connection?

The pressure is always on. Our way of relieving stress is to work even harder. We experience temporary relief at nailing a deadline, only to face our next one with a worn-out brain, not a fresh one. Trust me, our brains weren't built for this.

If I bowled, I would make sure to put on a funny shirt at least once a week and find a tribe of like-minded people to share fart jokes with. I happen to play water volleyball, so shirts, even funny ones, are not allowed in the pool. But fart jokes rule.

Fart jokes is my metaphor for playing like the true experts - five-year olds. If I were to write another book, I would want to call it. "Fart-Joking Together." But my publisher would probably insist on changing it to "The Wisdom of Being Five." I can live with that.

Or maybe "The Stupidity of Being Seven." Really, I have no idea how I survived age seven, but that's when I mastered kickball and learned an important life lesson in the process:

I arrived at school that day determined to kick a home run. No doubt about it. I could visualize it perfectly in my mind. All morning, when I was supposed to be learning multiplication and cursive handwriting, I was focused on my game. Finally, my moment came.

The ball rolled toward home plate. I ran to meet it. I lined up my shot and aimed my kick as hard as I could in the direction of right field ...

The ball skittered off the side of my foot. A girl in a pink dress picked it up and touched me out.

A week or two later, I got my home run. I trotted slowly to the ball and gave it a controlled kick. My foot hit the ball's sweet spot and the thing sailed over everyone's heads in center field. Even in my wildest dreams, I could never imagine kicking the ball that far.

All these years later, I vividly recall watching that ball take off like a rocket. No, I take that back. This was 1957, the year the Soviets launched Sputnik. Their rockets worked. Ours blew up on the launching pad.

Anyway, here I was, standing at home plate, surveying my handiwork sailing higher than our best rockets could fly, too surprised to even start running. Then I collected my wits and headed for first, then second, third ...

And they want to take that away from kids? Guess what? They're not going to take it away from me.

***

Sign up now: World Adult Kickball Association.

Laugh and Play

A number of years ago, while researching for my email Newsletter, I came across reports of "laughter" groups in Germany and India.

What? I thought. You actually had to teach - or at least encourage - people to laugh? Apparently so. Two years ago, at a national NAMI convention, I encountered a bunch of people who had gathered for a group laugh. There is even an organization that conducts laughter workshops.

Laughter comes wrapped in play. In a recent blog, I noted:

"Play is a vital element in our recovery. So much so, I contend, that if you are not spending at least part of your time acting like a child then getting through adulthood is going to pose a major challenge."

Let me assure you, I have acting like a child down pat. I cultivate a playful spirit, which has not only served me well, but is directly responsible for me not quitting on life. But a playful spirit is not the same as play, as I learned when I first started playing water volleyball two and a bit years ago.

I recall driving home from that first outing with my good friend Paul, who introduced me to the game. "You know," I said, "I haven't felt like this since I was five."

Okay, maybe nine or ten, but five was a very good year for me. Try to recall life at five. If you are having difficulty, you really need to be reading this:

Four or five years ago, Kay Jamison (who needs no introduction) published "Exuberance." The book did not sell nearly as well as her previous books, which is a shame, because what she has to say is vital to our well-being.

In her book, Dr Jamison mentions the disturbing trend toward eliminating recess in schools. Play is critical in the development of kids and young mammals, she says, from ensuring a fully-functioning nervous system to acquiring the intelligence and skills they will later put to use as adults.

When I talked to Dr Jamison about this, she told me that over-regimenting kids’ lives can have enormous consequences for our society.

Kids have the luxury of play under the protection of adults, Dr Jamison explained to me. Later, it becomes their turn to provide that same level of comfort and protection to their offspring. Nevertheless, some adults manage to retain their childlike capacity to respond in wonder to the world around them the rest of their lives, and Dr Jamison's book is full of these examples (such as Teddy Roosevelt).

But these are people who bring a certain lust for life to their work. Work! What about play?

More later ...

Further reading from mcmanweb:

Exuberance

In our phone interview, Dr Jamison stressed that exuberance comes in degrees. The people in her book tend to experience it in supersized dimensions, but even those who are depressed can catch it like a contagion. "Joy infects," she writes. "Expressive individuals strongly influence the moods of those who are unexpressive."

Notwithstanding her observation of exuberance as a temperament, the author cites a 1980 study of hers where 35 bipolar patients reported positive benefits to their illness, including increased sensitivity, sexuality, productivity, creativity, and social outgoingness. Virginia Woolf, who is best remembered for her madness and suicide, tends to be forgotten as the person who lit up London’s Bloomsbury group. Said a colleague: " I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two excellent glasses of champagne. She was a life-enhancer."

Play Is the Thing

Saturday morning water volleyball: The server is lining up her shot. She is poised to fire a cannonball down the left side when Paul on the other side lets out a vocal operatic rumble.

The server reloads and composes herself.

"And the next one will be real!" Paul shouts.

The entire pool cracks up. People in their 50s laughing at fart jokes. It's like we were five years old, but that's the point. Read on:

"Play" resumes. The ball is being slapped from player to player at pinball speed. We're all in the zone, fielding impossible shots. A rocket is returned to our side of the net. One of our guys manages to get a hand on it. It bounces off at an unexpected angle into my airspace in the front corner, headed high and out of bounds.

No time to think. I lunge backward like a painter who has fallen off a ladder and extend the only arm I seem to have available, praying for Inspector Gadget powers. I manage to get my fingers on a piece of the ball, just enough to send a high floater arcing parallel to the net. The players in the front row on the other side are licking their chops in anticipation.

Oh oh, one of them is about to make me look like an idiot.

But just then, the earth unexpectedly stops rotating. Gravity is temporarily suspended. The ball simply hangs in the air on our side of the net. Then it starts its slow descent to where our best player is lurking.

"Oh, crap!" I hear from the other side. Our best player leaps out of the water like a dolphin at Sea World and effortlessly dispatches the waiting orb on its mission of doom.

Suddenly, the atmosphere on our side of the pool erupts in the loudest display of group noise in recorded history. The Ross Ice Shelf breaking into icebergs at three in the morning is the nearest equivalent sound. Even those on the other side are nodding their heads in silent appreciation.

What a volley! You can see it on every face in the pool. Life doesn't get any better than this.

Yes it does. It was my "assist" that set up the kill. Who cares if it was dumb luck? A shorter person would have missed the ball completely, and everyone in the pool is shorter than me.

I did it! I did it!

Before we know it, our allotted 90 minutes of pool time has elapsed. Time to take down the nets and floating boundaries and vacate the pool. There will be another game in the afternoon.

My good friend Paul introduced me to water volleyball two and bit years ago, shortly after I moved from New Jersey to southern California. At the time I was hesitant about joining him. I'm clumsy, with bad eyesight. In school, I was the smallest kid and always the last one picked on a team.

Last thing I need is an activity that brings up all those bad memories.

Instead, the game casts me back to an earlier and far more pleasant time in childhood - ages five, six, seven, eight, nine - when we played with other neighborhood kids in backyards, driveways, pieces of empty street, and vacant lots. Baseball, kickball, dodgeball, football, badminton, hide and seek ...

There were no adults organizing the game for us, much less kibitzing from the sideline. We improvised our own rules as we went along, with no one in authority to correct us. Sometimes it was baseball with two bases. If someone was trundling along a little brother, we suspended play to give the little brother a turn at bat. The play was the thing.

PLAY was the thing.

How on earth, in our transition from childhood to adulthood, did we ever forget that? Where - where - did we go wrong?

Much more to come ...

Play!

My good friend Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue has been urging me for some time to do a blog piece on the benefits of play. Her piece today, Do Something You Love, serves as a timely reminder why I need to get crackin'. Therese writes:

Last summer, when I was going through a bout of depression, a friend told me to do what made me happy as a kid. So I tuned up my mountain bike and headed to the trails for a few hours. Afterward I treated myself to an ice-cream cone: mint-chocolate chip with LOTS of chocolate sprinkles on top. That was exactly how I spent so many summer days as kid.

My brain recalled it, because I could hear a voice say, "Oh yeah. I remember this. It was fun ... before your dad put you on treadmill and a diet and you were afraid to eat ice-cream again."

What happens to us when we get older? Are we programmed to actually forget how to be happy?

Remember what it was like when you were five? When you and your friends had that feeling of never wanting to stop? Until your moms called you in for dinner?

Why can't we bring back some of that?

Trust me, I will be writing an awful lot on this. Play is a vital element in our recovery. So much so, I contend, that if you are not spending at least part of your time acting like a child then getting through adulthood is going to pose a major challenge.

In the meantime, in case you have forgotten what play is like, here is a video from my two resident experts, Rocky and Bullwinkle at age six weeks. Enjoy ...