I thought my idea was pretty clever. I knew it was impractical. And so when the older, retired lawyer cast a bemused, mildly exasperated glance over at his older, retired paralegal wife after I shared my idea with them, I wasn’t surprised.
My idea was based on my experience on mountain summits. Unless I’m skiing, I always end up wishing I didn’t have to hike back down. Ah, I think, if only I could fly down. Like this man from South Africa, the first person legally to paraglide from Everest’s summit. His descent took 20 minutes versus several grueling days on foot. But a paraglide is a lot of extra gear to pack, and so I thought, what if I could use my smartphone to descend? Along with most hikers, I always carry my smartphone with me in the backcountry. What if a smartphone could serve a function similar to a spider’s spinneret, and secrete on command a kind of “silk thread” or line with enough tensile strength to support a human’s weight? A dedicated app and algorithm could determine a safe angle and zone for landing and direct the spun thread to those GPS coordinates. A person then could use a harness and carabiner to attach to the smartphone spinneret’s line, and off they’d go, like riding a zipline. Each line would be designed to evaporate after only a few hours, so as to avoid a dangerous, environmentally unfriendly web of zipline litter.
“Hey, it wasn’t long ago that the idea of the smartphone itself seemed impossible,” I protested when I saw the old lawyer’s less-than-appreciative reaction to my idea. “The best innovations all seem impossible at first.”
But this was a man who, when I told him and his wife that what I wanted most career-wise was to write literature, said—with the authoritative voice of presumed pragmatism—“Well, if you want to write, you have to figure out what you want to write about.”
He wasn’t wrong, of course (just painfully obvious), but I sensed that maybe I needed to protect from his scrutiny what I’d already well figured out I wanted to write about. War, the environment, the contemporary lives of X demographic group—I suspected those answers might agree with his logic. But my answer, that I wanted to play with the possibilities of language, story, and communication where I only was limited by my own imagination, I suspected would sound childish to him.
I’ve found that there are people who treat ideas like play, where an idea’s merit isn’t predicated on how possible it is. Then, there are people who measure the value of an idea by how well—that is, straightforwardly and conservatively—it might solve a particular real-world problem. A zany idea to these latter people is useless, whereas for the people in the former category, it’s a delight, not only for its oddity but also for the daring feat of imagination it demonstrates.
For instance, I once knew a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist and a not-quite-as-successful (if we’re measuring “success” in terms of wealth) architect whose wives were close friends. The architect was a playful, imaginative man who, post-retirement, invented a theoretical alternative system of government to help manage late-stage capitalism. He explicated in detail his system in hundreds of pages that he faxed, unbidden, to the White House—pages and pages of government theory very possibly rolling out, as fax machine pages did in those days, on some White House intern’s desk. When I told the entrepreneur-philanthropist how “cool” I thought the architect’s bold and cheeky move was, he waved his hand dismissively and scoffed, “Oh, please, everything [the architect] does turns to shit.” By which I knew he meant, “doesn’t make money.”
When I was fifteen, the architect asked me to send him a short story I’d written. A few weeks later, I received a fat envelope from him, of illustrations he’d drawn to accompany my story. It wasn’t the first time someone had taken my writing seriously, i.e., reading it closely and responding with care, generosity, and respectful criticism. It was, however, the first time anyone had joined me in the play of creating a story. That felt to me like the very highest form of someone taking my writing seriously. The architect, like me, was serious about play, regardless of whether it changed the world or made money. Whereas the entrepreneur-philanthropist was serious about making and giving money. Both men were creative; both were successful in their careers because of their ideas; but one engaged with ideas as a form of play that may or may not serve practical ends, while the other engaged with ideas as potential solutions to monetary problems.
The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga proposed in 1938 that man rightly could be called by an additional name to Homo sapiens, which translates to “man the wise.” He suggested in
his book by the same name that man also could be called “man the player,” or Homo ludens. “For many years the conviction has grown upon me,” he wrote, “that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” He claimed that “all play means something,” and thus it is not very different from the cultural functions served by rites and ceremonies. He said:
The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath.
For children, of course, play is serious business, as any of us knows who has engaged with children in play on their terms. Why do so many of us lose that spontaneity and lability inherent in play as we grow into adults? The retired lawyer’s pooh-poohing of my smartphone-spinneret-zipline idea was momentarily crushing in the same way that made me conceal my imaginative play from my parents when I was 12 and played on my bed with toys every day after school. I knew I was supposed to have outgrown this habit, judging from my peers’ claims that they had outgrown it, but for me it felt like a need that would destroy me to relinquish.
Play helped me make sense of my experience, of my feelings and of the world and people around me. It helped give me a sense of control over how I understood and reacted to the things that happened to me. It enabled me to better imagine how other people might feel, by putting myself, in play, in their shoes, imagining their story as my story. I remember that after my after-school play sessions, I always felt better, and more on top of things socially and academically.
The need play fulfilled for me overrode my shame, though my shame, and desire to be just as grown up as my peers claimed to be (“claimed,” I say, because I later learned that some of them, too, had secretly still played with toys when they were 12), drove me to find a more age-appropriate way to play. I discovered writing stories as a way to continue the same play, but entirely in my imagination, without having to manually play with physical toys. By writing my stories, I could get much more story out much faster than if I had to enact everything with toys on my bed. In the arts, in writing, I found a “loophole” that enabled me to continue my imaginative play just as I had as a young child, but now it was as much in the service of beauty and communicating something meaningful as it was in the simultaneous regulation and liberation of my own mind and psyche.
It seems that other children might evolve their play toward activities that revolve more around analytical problem-solving than around imagination—puzzles, games, and building sets, say, versus writing, drawing, or listening to or playing music. In other words, fixing or building something that’s in front of them rather than imagining something that’s not.
I wrote the previous sentence knowing that analytical problem-solving also requires imagination; one has to imagine the fixed or built version of the broken or un-built thing in front of them, and imagine the steps needed to fix or build it, such as how one imagines several moves ahead in the game of chess. In a similar vein, one of my literature professors in graduate school told me I should consider focusing my career on writing fiction rather than literary criticism because, as she said, “You seem to think in these flashes of insight, as opposed to analytically.”
“But where do you imagine those flashes of insight come from?” I protested. “They come only after long stretches of close reading and analysis. There can’t be one without the other.”
She may or may not have known what I meant—she had an openly bitter relationship with academia and trends in literary criticism that seemed to direct all her views toward the same conclusion, i.e., that anyone with a mind was better off far from academia—but I knew what she meant: that indeed there is a categorical difference between the kind of playing with ideas that results in a work of fiction versus the kind that results in a so-called “real-world” problem solved. (Not that literary criticism necessarily is a “real-world problem solved,” but that’s another discussion.) It’s the difference exemplified in the architect’s ‘play for play’s sake’ versus the entrepreneur-philanthropist’s ‘play for money’s sake.’ The difference is as narrow as a single strand of hair, but the implications are wide.
“Thinking,” Freud said, “is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action.” I like this definition of thinking because it emphasizes its inherently experimental, or playful, quality. Thinking is play with imagined possibilities, but since all of our thinking is not dedicated to problem-solving, Freud’s definition leaves room for the seeming randomness of thought—for dreams, which is thinking in our sleep, for memory we’re aware of and memory we’re not, for strands of thought that begin outside our awareness and take time to rise into our consciousness. For thinking that’s not always within our control, that’s not always directed toward the aim of problem-solving, that’s thinking for its own sake because our brains are made up of neurons that make thoughts and ideas happen whether we want them to or not. Our minds are inherently playful.
One of my undergraduate professors told me that the first consideration when determining the value of pursuing a particular question was whether it was answerable. If a question wasn’t answerable, she said, it wasn’t worth pursuing. I remember feeling childish in the same way I felt playing with toys at age 12, because then as now, about every five waking minutes I come up with questions that are impossible to answer. I could ask questions all day. It’s exercise for my mind, like lifting weights at the gym. Does it matter that lifting weights serves no purpose but to strengthen muscles, as opposed to, say, hoisting hay bales into a truck bed?
My mind at play comes up with all kinds of odd-seeming things. I remember riding the subway one day years ago, passively observing the people around me, when suddenly the image arose in my mind of all of them sporting large genitalia in the middle of their foreheads. The perverse ridiculousness of the image of a person tossing their head to move their forehead-penis from their line of vision made me chuckle. What use does such a bizarre idea serve? A play of possibilities, that is all. One that, shared, might entertain and stimulate others’ imaginations. But that wouldn’t be its original purpose, which was simply my thoughts exercising themselves without my conscious input.
It appears to me that contemporary society doesn’t give enough credit to this kind of thinking. We tend to favor the kind of problem-solving creativity exemplified by the entrepreneur-philanthropist more than the play-for-play’s-sake creativity exemplified by the architect. It’s pretty obvious, for example, that the retired lawyer measured the value of an idea solely by its practical, problem-solving possibilities.
The theoretical physicist Abraham (Avi) Loeb, considering the question of where ideas come from, supports the view that an idea has to demonstrate a certain promise of feasibility to merit the investment of resources to bring it to fruition. He says, “…a good idea must be followed up by a feasibility study that evaluates its promise and nurtures its further growth if it appears promising.” My smartphone-spinneret-zipline idea might not pass the test of a feasibility study (let alone, let’s face it, a test of safety). But Loeb points out that ideas originate from “fertile” minds, and what makes minds fertile, he says, “is the freedom to venture without the confines of traditional thinking or the burden of practical concerns.” Perhaps to get to the most “feasible” idea, one must free their mind to entertain a succession of highly improbable ideas. If a smartphone could produce a spinneret, for instance, why not instead have it produce a paraglide wing for a weary mountaineer? That’s a worthy idea, too, even if it turns out not to be practical, or feasible. “Immersing oneself in the trivia of common wisdom,” Loeb writes, “resembles reading yesterday’s news in the daily newspaper, with no prospect for making a difference.” But he warns that innovative thinking that transcends common wisdom is only possible in “a culture that encourages informal questioning and inquiry, tolerates mistakes and promotes innovation.”
In a culture that is squeamish about paying for anything that’s not “evidence-based,” where employees must produce measurable results in order to be deemed deserving of keeping their jobs or gaining a raise, where students from elementary through graduate school receive grades for their work that help determine financial aid and future prospects, there isn’t much room for informal questioning, mistakes, and promoting anything but the status quo. This places a lot of pressure on the single idea that arises like a tender, delicate shoot from the ever-turning soil of thought. Have you ever found yourself nipping an idea in the proverbial bud simply because it seemed, at first sight, a little ridiculous, impossible, or impractical?
I know I have, and what a shame: As Loeb writes, “…once successful, a single excellent idea could be worth the investment in a hundred failed ones.” This supports play-for-play’s-sake thinking, questioning, and idea-generating as being just as valid and necessary as “problem-solving” thinking.
What got me thinking about all of this is a page I found in one of my journals from a few years ago. I’d opened the journal in search of something else, and this page caught my eye because it mentioned the “midlife crisis” I’d had at age 13 that I also wrote about on this website’s “About” page. I read the whole page, and was struck by how many seeds for Legs to Stand On were evident in what I wrote. Back then, there was no way I’d have started a blog. I thought that blogs, generally, were a waste of time—yet another internet distraction that would rob me of time to write things I really wanted to write, and to read the rotating pile of books I keep on my bedside table, let alone rob me of time to do other things. It took a knee injury, and befriending someone who’d created a blog that seemed to be helping a lot of people including herself, to open me up to the idea of creating a blog of my own. Here’s the page from my journal:
When I was 13, I had a midlife crisis and wrote an essay about it. “Have I accomplished anything yet?” I asked. “Does my life mean anything, and what does it mean?”
And now, I’m having the real thing. I’m 39 today, and grateful to be here because I’ve practiced gratitude, good attitude, a happy mood, a soul that’s
brightly hued and well construed. But maybe I’m more disappointed than anything else. Isn’t it okay to just say, “Hey! It sucks!” and not be called a downer? I mean, nothing—nothing—has turned out like I’d hoped. I’m one birthday away from being the proverbial cat lady, and in my zeal to make the best of things I say, “Hell with it; I’m going to dare and dare and dare and none of this, this solitude, this loss, this failure, will matter!” But even if I find myself doing headstands on Denali’s summit, it won’t change the fact that no one picked me. Maybe I don’t want to be picked. Maybe there is freedom in it, greater than the pleasure of being loved. But maybe I’m just bullshitting myself.
There is a tree in my yard, a young tree with a trunk no thicker than my Camelbak water bottle. Two years ago a bear tore the whole treetop clean off to get at the red berries hanging heavily from the upper branches. My landlords said they’d cut it down and that made sense, since the tree wouldn’t grow anymore, wouldn’t fulfill its full adult tree life swaying far above the earth. But then it grew differently. It began to protrude branches all the way down to the base of its trunk. It couldn’t grow up, so it grew out. It grew because it had to, and now no one will cut it down.
So how can I be that tree? What does it mean to show up? You get mangled and ripped; does that make you real?
The entry, written on my 39th birthday, was an exercise during a Saturday day-long writing class I’d given myself as a present. It signified my commitment to take my writing seriously and never back down, whether out of fear, to attend to so-called “practical concerns,” or for any other reason. I showed up to the class with my car packed for a long drive to the start of a three-day solo backpacking trip where I camped by a tourmaline-colored lake (the one in the top photo of this post, as a matter of fact) and climbed a challenging route up a 14,155-foot-tall peak with some of the most spectacular views I’d ever enjoyed. Writing and outdoor adventure were the ways I’d found, that day at least, to be like the tree that didn’t grow in the way it seemed initially to be slated to grow.
The journal entry, and remembering what I did the day I wrote it, struck me with how much our daily lives, and our thoughts, contain potential solutions to our problems. Every moment we live is fertile with ideas. Maybe, when we feel stuck or stymied, it’s because we don’t know how to play with the ideas at our disposal. So what if an idea, once nourished and pursued, turns into nothing? It’s not possible for an idea to turn to nothing, as Avi Loeb points out. It could be the seed of the next wonderful idea. How might we give ourselves the freedom to fully engage in the play of ideas that is an inherent part of our every lived moment? Imagine—imagine—what might become possible if we could cultivate that ability.
Copyright ©2024 Legs to Stand On. All rights reserved. Top photo by the author.