My lifelong association with agriculture has developed a capacity for delusional levels of optimism. Will the seeds of tender greens sprout, grow, and survive crisping drought and invasive hordes of grasshoppers? A ridiculous proposition, but a hopeful one. Will fruit trees establish roots even amongst all the rocks, and successfully blossom despite daily knock-you-on-your-heels wind gusts? Silly to try, but the orchard could be lovely. In truth, it would be best to accept the futility of many of my growing efforts, but instead I plant extra and cross my fingers.
I fear that humanity is in a similar loop of wishful thinking, but one with more destructive negative consequences. After decades of increasing fossil fuel use and goofy justifications for trusting capitalism to get us out of the jam that capitalism created, the odds of productive planetary collaboration to address the climate crisis are looking slim. Human cultures must now adjust to dramatic changes, and it is possible that the rate and impact of those shifts will accelerate in the months and years to come. Our old solutions aren’t working, and the stakes are too high to lean solely on hope and crossing our collective fingers.
To build new systems, to act in a generative direction, we must get beyond our current experience. As Mariame Kaba said, we need our “imaginations unleashed.”[1] To live hopefully while remaining present to the death that surrounds us, we must dream up paths forward, and also experience joy in our present. I’m suggesting a strategy of play, a willful embrace of creativity, curiosity, and outright silliness.
There are few vocal opponents of imagination, at least until it comes to the doing of it. But aside from sparkly clouds of computer-generated butterflies, what does the work of creativity look like? Should we hunt up old curtains, get creative with tinfoil, and join in a rousing session of dress-up with capes and reflective headgear? Can we even bring ourselves to party while weighed down by the doom and gloom of the news cycle, or even the hateful and often incorrectly punctuated bumper stickers on the jacked-up pickup truck at the grocery store?
From a purely pragmatic perspective, play is a productive and essential practice. Our domesticated mammalian relatives offer innumerable examples of this. Goat kids cavort, careening between available surfaces as they develop their skills at verticality; calves run together across the pasture with zigzags and sudden turns, honing their ability to evade predators. Piglets negotiate for space in the pig pile, learning to navigate the relational requirements of pig community.
One might say that human children play because they live a life of ease, but the struggle to speak, think, gain control of one’s bodily systems and movement, comprehend a cultural context, build relationships, and craft an identity, all in the span of a decade, is intense work. Imagination and play are the stuff of life for kids, avenues to problem solving, maturation, and survival. Running, jumping, twirling, galumphing – these are ways of exploring the world in a body, and develop both energizing movement and the ability to work with others.
Across species, play develops the skills necessary for physical survival. In human youngsters, it also reveals the world as a space of wonder. Molly Rozum’s Grasslands Grown looks at the creation of place across the Northern Plains, and includes the reflections of settler-colonial children on their creative play. Nell Wilson, a prairie resident, “described what she felt as a child standing on the grasslands of Saskatchewan as ‘hear[ing] with your skin’ or a ‘sort of feeling magic through your feet.’”[2] The gifts of play include mystery, awe, and meaning, the burbling giggle that tumbles out in the merriment of moving.
As an adult, leaping into a practice of play feels inordinately awkward, but history shows that creativity and imagination are routes to living in desperate circumstances. In the 1800s, enslaved Americans sang the blues, and their descendants crafted jazz under the weight of Jim Crow. Confined to Terezin and later murdered at Auschwitz, artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis taught children to create in the midst of horror as an act of humanity and resistance. Craft and art stand as redemptive responses to shared pain and tragedy.
Like Dicker-Brandeis, can we marvel at beauty? Like Nina Simone, can we play amid pain? According to philosopher Regan Penaluna, “art, philosophy, and literature tell us…that the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition – if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves – if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer – from our despair.”[3] Play, expressed in the childhood delight of jumping rope or the grown-up pleasure in grooving to a beat, delivers physical rapture in our present and invites us into communion with other “life forms” – human, animal, elemental, and weather-related alike.
In our contemporary existential seriousness, capes and hats won’t deliver an immediate reduction in CO2 production, but finding moments of respite from consistent heaviness is likely to free up our problem-solving capabilities, allow us to see less-than-obvious options, and enable more creative ways of being together. At a bare minimum, we might thrill to the fun of shared exploration or feel the balm of commonality.
We are deeply connected across time and culture and even species. That linkage leaves us open and vulnerable, and also powerful. Strength comes from the entwining webs of thought and care and shared space between animals, bugs, birds, humans, and ideas. Our power lies in playfully imagining and living into a different world. Valuing relationality won’t save us from death, pain, loss, or climate catastrophe, but it does mean that we can taste a delicious meal, feel the wind, and get phenomenally goofy together.
Can we embrace imagination without guilt or shame, walking boldly into a shared future with brazen creativity? Playing at life might just be the best way forward.
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[1] Abolition Collective, eds. “Making Abolitionist Worlds: Proposals for a World on Fire,” in Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, Issue 2, Common Notions: Brooklyn, NY, 2020, p. 4.
[2] Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2021, p. 94.
[3] Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind, Grove Press: New York, 2023, p. 249.
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