Sunnyvale Rest Home is the setting of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes.[1] It features Charles Whitley, an old man who believes he can recapture his childhood if he thinks and plays like a child. The catch is that he needs the help of others. Childhood play, starting with hide-and-seek and extending through red rover, tag, Annie-I-over, and cops and robbers, requires group innocence and lightheartedness. Ben Conroy, Charles’s best friend since they were boys, is appalled upon hearing Charles’s proposal that they lead the other residents out one evening to play kick the can. Old Charlie must be going senile, he thinks. Besides, it’s against rest home rules. Old age is serious business.

Nevertheless, Charles gathers up enough residents to test his theory, and playing like children, they are soon transformed into children, running about, and having fun in the dark. Upon realizing what’s happened, Ben notifies the rest home superintendent, who along with Ben, goes outside to investigate. All the superintendent sees are a bunch of kids scampering about and making too much noise. He chases them away, and all but Charlie run off into the night. Charlie lingers briefly to stare quizzically at Ben, now an anonymous old man begging to be returned to his childhood. But Ben’s moment has passed. As the superintendent goes off to look for the errant residents, Ben sits on the steps of the rest home, holding the kicked can and pondering the miracle that has just occurred.

The episode ends with Rod Serling’s closing narration: “Sunnyvale Rest, a dying place for ancient people who have forgotten the fragile magic of youth. A dying place for those who have forgotten [that] childhood, maturity, and old age are curiously intertwined and not separate. A dying place for those who have grown too stiff in their thinking to visit the Twilight Zone.”

Yes, “childhood, maturity, and old age are curiously intertwined and not separate.” My mother grew up in Payson, Utah, in the first half of the twentieth century. She said that on Sunday evenings, after long church meetings, families would go to the city park to relax, visit, and listen to the city band. The kids, she added, would “just run wild.” Decades later after my father died, Utah relatives decided it was time for her to move back to Payson. She had, after all, spent nearly fifty years in a little backwater town in southeastern Idaho. Upon visiting Payson, she drove around the old neighborhood and relived her childhood memories. The nostalgia was so powerful, she said, that it almost made her physically ill. She decided to remain in Idaho.

Not that long ago, nostalgia was regarded as a disease. In the seventeenth century, medical doctors noted that when away from home, soldiers, sailors, convicts, and domestic servants sometimes fell critically ill upon hearing bagpipes or an old milking song, or after picking up on any sound, sight, scent, or taste that swept them back to their past. Cures were prescribed to shock or shake them out of their homesickness. They were like despondent animals caught in the wild and put in a cage, but in this case the cage was the outside world. How could anyone thrive when taken out of their native habitat, out of their nest?

Nostalgia stems from two Greek words: nostos, meaning “homecoming,” is cognate with nest and is notably associated with Odysseus’s return home to his faithful wife Penelope after twenty years of war and seafaring adventure; algia denotes pain. So “painful longing for home” is the literal meaning of the word nostalgia. Today, however, it is generally regarded as a wistful longing for a past time or place. For most people it is not debilitating, though it can be bittersweet.

Nostalgia is a kind of emotional time travel in which the present and the past “are curiously intertwined and not separate.” If childhood is a time of “fragile magic,” as Rod Serling proposed, it may become even more magical when seen through the haze of adult difficulties and responsibilities, all of which tend to disabuse us of our early innocence. In the Twilight Zone episode, Charles was able to hang onto the magic, despite the erosion of innocence. Ben was not. He had grown “too stiff” in his thinking to be anything more than an old man locked in an old body. But somewhere in Lehi’s compound-in-one reality, where light and darkness compound together, the magic of childhood is still up for grabs.

Why Play?

What is the “real business” of life—the work and seriousness that define our adult years, or the play and lightheartedness that ideally inform childhood? We often talk as if childhood play is something to be left behind so as to get on with the real business of making a living, making a name for oneself, and so on. Work trumps play, and the school of hard knocks is more instructive and life-clarifying than what happens on the playground.

Many have compared our exit from childhood to Adam and Eve’s exit from the Garden of Eden. They stepped out into the lone and dreary world and found themselves obliged to suffer pain and hardship to satisfy their physical needs and raise their children. We follow in the footsteps of Adam and Eve when we take on adult responsibilities. We learn the hard way that success in life involves more than just doing as we wish and innocently indulging our interests.

As near as I can recall, the hard truth of the necessity of hard work first dawned on me in the sixth grade. I was a lackluster student and chose to spend most my after-school hours playing with friends rather than doing homework. My worst subject was math, and I didn’t have the self-discipline to learn how to solve story problems. This would have been fine had my teacher just asked us to hand in our solutions so that he could correct them after school. He, however, used class time to go over the problems and randomly called on students to share their answers with the rest of the class. For me it was like playing Russian roulette because I knew my answers, which were nothing more than guesses, would invariably get shot down.

I didn’t like being embarrassed in front of my classmates. I also noted that the students who had learned the material were eager to be called on and eager to offer corrective comments. They were enjoying themselves, while I was tense and jittery. One day it occurred to me that I would suffer less if I just buckled down and studied hard. But this was a fleeting thought, and another eight years would pass before I finally learned to apply myself. That happened when I entered the mission field.

And yet my childlike carefreeness was a blessing in disguise. When I began my mission, I was like a dry, empty sponge waiting to soak up understanding. Too scattered to prepare myself beforehand through prayer or scripture study, I was just there for the ride. But from day one I found the ride more interesting than anything I had ever done before. It was like a light turned on, and contrary to what is typically the case, my first year in the mission field was happier than my second. I preferred being a junior companion because I could devote myself to the work without thought of mission statistics and what we called “mission politics.” When I was made a senior companion and given leadership responsibilities, it was as if some pure aspect of missionary work vanished from the land. Looking back, I realize I was not ready for the responsibility. It was too heavy given my pre-mission track record of just coasting. Besides, having to worry about goals and statistics took some of the fun out of missionary work.

To succeed in life, most people must make a bargain with the world of administrative goals, quotas, grades, and statistics. In his Autobiographical Notes, Albert Einstein spoke of the delight that attended his early self-directed discoveries and the subsequent unpleasantness of classroom learning. At age four or five, he was deeply impressed by the way the needle of a magnetic compass invariably swings northward. This taught him that there are unseen forces in the world, that there must be “something behind things, something deeply hidden.”[2] At age twelve, he chanced upon a “holy geometry booklet” explaining the principles of Euclidean geometry: five foundational postulates from which a superstructure of mathematical truth could be built through logical inference. “The lucidity and certainty [of the process] made an indescribable impression on me,” he recalled.[3] Thereafter it was a struggle to hang on to these revelations and the exhilaration that accompanied them as he continued his schooling, which he felt was coercive and hostile to childlike wonder. He wrote that it is “nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. . . . It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”[4]

Einstein had to navigate a path between one-size-fits-all school requirements and the childlike wonder and wide-open exploration of nature that marked his early years. He felt the tension that all of us feel at some point in our passage into adulthood. Recall William Wordsworth, who remembered that the “celestial light” that framed his early childhood “fade[d] into the light of common day” as “shades of the prison-house” began to close about him in his boyhood years. He explains this loss of light as part of the accommodation we make to mortality after leaving “God, who is our home.” For Latter-day Saints, this all makes sense, given our doctrine of premortality.

As it was for our Savior, physical birth for us was a dwindling or sizing-down, although on a more modest scale. To ascend we too must first descend, and physical birth is descent into a cramped world. This is not a bad thing, for in the end we are liberated by the very things that bind us, the hurts and weaknesses we struggle against. “All beings, to be crowned with crowns of glory and eternal lives,” taught Brigham Young, “must in their infantile weakness begin, with regard to their trials, the day of the probation. They must descend below all things, in order to ascend above all things.”[5]

What does this descent entail? Of course the acquisition of a weak, helpless physical body and memory loss of pre-earth experience. But our belief in “noble and great” intelligences foreordained to particular earth callings suggests that we do not come as perfect blanks (Abraham 3:22). We come with predispositions and talents. And quite plausibly, I think, we come like chickadees, which Aldo Leopold described as comically small birds filled with “large enthusiasms.”[6] We bring with us the expansive possibilities of our premortal heavenly home, not yet knowing the constraints and chastisements of earth life. Hence, our innate disposition to run free, to play.

Work and Play

Often we think of play as a stage we pass through in order to graduate into the work-related responsibilities of adulthood. Many, however, have suggested that play comes before work not just chronologically but in terms of our very nature. Play is leaven, levity, and lightness that rescues us from the same old grind. Work is “a negotiation with death,” states Bartlett Giamatti, while “play aspires to the condition of paradise,” his point being (among other things) that work is a way of staving off individual death but play brings about a conviviality and largeness of life that supersedes the individual.[7] Work can be and often is a lonely endeavor even when it is not solitary, but play begins and ends with others—sometimes just an imaginary friend.

Further, play trades in the coin of novelty and surprise, for to play is to break out of what must be. The whole point of peekaboo, perhaps the first form of human play, is surprise, and two people play only so long as new variations are possible. In brief, play works by opening space for fresh variation, for surprise. We play and watch sports because they are a reasonably safe escape from the predictable routines that otherwise govern and sometimes deaden our lives. We punch out breathing holes in our schedule for the fresh air of play.

In his classic study Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga remarked that “play is a thing on its own,” something “that resists all analysis, all logical interpretation.”[8] He then proposed that play refutes the thesis that we are nothing more than puppets or automatons living in a deterministic universe. Sure, much of the time we may just be responding uncreatively to antecedent causes and pressures, whether physical or social, but when we play, spirit, mind, and freewill peek through. Said Huizinga:

You can deny seriousness, but not play. . . . But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever play is, it is not [lifeless] matter. Even in the animal world it bursts the bounds of the physically existent. From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous. Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.[9]

For Huizinga, childhood play is continuous with the creative pursuits that constitute human culture. Language, music, literature, theater, art, mathematics, and science did not come about in a strictly logical, laborious way, which is why the word play feels right when we speak of these endeavors: wordplay, roleplay, the play of ideas, playing the piano, and so on. Any endeavor can feel laborious, perfunctory, and even mindless at first, but when the work that goes into learning begins to pay off, we feel free, light, and playful. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-American physicist who did important work in the development of fission energy, said that his goal in learning another language was to get to the point where he could crack jokes and tease colleagues.

Play implies recreation, which can also be understood as re-creation. Joseph Smith is remembered for his stick-pulling, ball-playing, wrestling, and swimming. Criticized for playing too much, he told the story of a hunter with a bow who acknowledged the need to unstring his bow after using it. Otherwise the bow would lose its elasticity and become nonfunctional. Just so with himself, said Joseph. Play or recreation kept him functional, refreshed, and sane.[10]

Along with Huizinga, Moritz Schlick saw play as life’s wellspring. Resisting the tide of pessimistic thought among Germans and Austrians in the disastrous wake of the First World War, Schlick argued that life is meaningful if and only if activities exist that are pursued solely for their own sake. Work (as conventionally understood) does not qualify as such because we work to feed and shelter ourselves. Normally, we would never work just to work, but we do play just to play. Hence, play expresses our delight in being alive. Without play, life would be a monotonous succession of chores, each done for the sake of the next one, and we would never taste life itself. With play, however, we engage in “free, purposeless action, that is, action which in fact carries its purpose within itself.”[11] Having intrinsic value, play mercifully rescues us from the chase associated with things that have none.

For Schlick, however, it is not just play but play’s rescue from dreary routine that makes life meaningful, because that rescue brings joy. He does not follow some thinkers who wish away work and toil, for this would leave us in a flat, tensionless, joyless world. “Joyous feasts,” he states, “are not possible without toilsome weeks.” And “the meaning of the whole is concentrated and collected . . . into a few short hours of deep, serene joy, into the hours of play.”[12]

Schlick acknowledges that people are different, and what one person calls work another might call play. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks of Rico Medellin, an assembly line factory worker who turned his work—extremely monotonous for most people—into a game or form of play that put him in a deeply rewarding “flow” state.[13] His assembly line task never changed, but he continually challenged himself to perform it a little more quickly, shaving off a fraction of a second here and there. This kept him engrossed for years, and while he worked to earn money, to him it felt more like play. Many labors lend themselves to this kind of transformation; work can become creative and intrinsically rewarding or joyful, and as a kind of afterthought, extrinsically rewarding.

For Schlick, joy is the mark of a meaningful life, and he insists that it should not be confused with pleasure. Each delivers us from ennui and hardship, but “pleasure wearies, while joy refreshes. The latter enriches, pleasure puts a false sheen upon existence.”[14] As Lehi said, joy is our very reason for being (we are that we might have joy), while pleasure is something less. Merrill Lewis, my priesthood adviser when I was a deacon, introduced me to this idea. He saw a friend and me skipping out of priesthood meeting and asked us where we were going. We said we were going home. When he asked why, I said, “Because church is no fun.” He let us go but not before teaching us a one-minute lesson to the effect that there is more to life than having fun. Despite its on-the-spot brevity, the lesson stuck with me. I had never considered the point before and we were outdoors at the time, an unusual place for a priesthood lesson.

Joy is a heavenly experience because it links us to the moment when “the morning stars sang together, and the sons [and daughters] of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). The occasion was the Grand Council in Heaven, and the premortal Christ offered himself as a sacrificial lamb so that we, on condition of repentance, might gain the benefit of mortal experience without the accompanying cost of mortal sin. “When the plan [of salvation] was announced to the assembled hosts,” wrote Hugh Nibley, “and the full scope and magnanimity of it dawned upon them, they burst into spontaneous shouts of joy and joined in a hymn of praise and thanksgiving, the morning song of Creation, which remains to this day the archetype of hymns, the great acclamatio, the primordial nucleus of all liturgy.”[15] This joy flowed into the Creation; it was the enabling breath or divine wind of Creation and it is still felt today when we are touched by the Holy Ghost. It emerges “without compulsory means” because it lives from the spontaneous eruption of joy that occasioned Christ’s voluntary sacrifice (Doctrine and Covenants 121:46).

I suggest that childlike, spontaneous play is a lifeline back to that eruption of joy and that we borrow our free will from Christ’s voluntary, free will offering. To play is to delight in the sheer exuberance of that transformative moment. “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways,” states the voice of Wisdom in the Old Testament. “I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. . . . I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men” (Proverbs 8:22–23, 30–31 Douay-Rheims translation).

The Intermingling of Play and Work

In Hinduism, the play of the gods (lila) stands in sharp contrast to the densely illusioned, laborious activity of humans.[16] Mortality is seen as an exercise in necessity. Not only must we respond to our survival needs, but generally speaking, our actions are determined or necessitated by prior causes. Allowing for cultural variation, this is the deterministic universe of nineteenth-century physics, and death is implicit in it. As we give ourselves up to the materialistic illusion that nothing exists but lifeless matter in motion, we become entrained to the mechanical cause-and-effect monotonies that govern physical matter.[17] Only an influx of spirit or mind, a revelation of play, can break the spell and give us life, which comes as we drink in the soul-expanding mirth of Deity and spontaneously hatch out of the deadening routines that would otherwise entomb us. Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and regeneration, dances the cosmos in and out of existence, thereby transforming the tomb of death into a womb of rebirth at each turn of the spiral. This dance, and dance in general, may be understood as a metaphor of existence. Dance, an activity that is simultaneously tiring and invigorating, effort-driven and (at its highest “flow state” pitch) effortless, embodies the intermingling of work and play.

Here again, in the spirit of Lehi’s teaching, play and work throw each other into relief. To toss one out the window is to toss the other as well. But this makes perfect sense since implicit in play is the expectation of challenge, confrontation, and obstacle. It isn’t easy to tag a fast playmate, hit a curveball, checkmate a grandmaster, become a concert pianist, or run a mile in less than five minutes, and that is just how we like it. In the best of all possible situations, we want our play to be challenging, even strenuous.

A rather different affirmation of play may be found in ancient China. The Taoist concept of wu wei means something like “doing nothing” or “action through inaction.” Phyllis Mazzocchi likens it to playing or wandering without a goal.[18] This may sound like a recipe for failure, but wu wei is not laziness. It coincides with the understanding that nature is not, as some might suppose, broken or lacking; why, therefore, try to fix it? Better to emulate the elemental principles that govern its action. Consider water, for example. When left to itself, it always follows the path of least resistance. It does no “work.” It expends no effort. It doesn’t try to push itself uphill, but just “wanders” downhill, apparently without intent. In the process, however, it accomplishes a great deal: it waters the earth. What is more, it wins the battle of the elements through its soft, acquiescent action. When it encounters rocks, say, it flows around them but over time wears them away and carves deep canyons in the earth. It shapes its environment by adapting itself to the shape of its environment. It achieves much through little or no effort. Just by “doing nothing” other than being itself.

The moral of the Taoist story is that it is better to be gentle and soft like water than hard and stubborn like rock. Better to wander through life acquiescently, adaptively, and playfully, than to try to bulldoze your way through life, just as it is better to learn to the art of sailing—of adapting your craft to the natural intelligence of wind and water—than to exhaust yourself rowing against a resisting current.[19] Practically speaking, this entails “giv[ing] way to the spontaneity of the present moment,” says Mazzocchi, rather than hanging on to the past or planning for tomorrow.[20] This, after all, is how children, in contrast to adults, tend to interact. They may get angry with playmates or friends, but they don’t nurse their anger or plot revenge scenarios—they move along acquiescently. “The way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend,” states the Tao Te Ching in one of its many affirmations of non-contention.[21] “Wu-wei,” notes Alan Watts, “is to roll with experiences as they come and go, like a ball in a mountain stream” without fixating on those experiences.[22]

When I was nine years old, my brother and I raised pigeons, as did some of our friends. One day I asked a friend if he would sell me two of his pigeons. He said he would for a dollar apiece. I bargained him down to fifty cents apiece, and we agreed to meet at his house after school to conclude the sale. When I got to his house with my dollar no one was home, so I went to his cage and innocently took two of his pigeons, thinking I would give him the dollar the next day at school. A couple of hours after I returned home, the doorbell rang, and when I answered the door there standing beside my friend was the local chief of police, in full uniform and with a holstered handgun on his hip. I was so terrified that when the police chief asked me why I had stolen my friend’s pigeons, I couldn’t speak. He then told me to get one of my parents, so I went in the kitchen, where my mother was preparing supper. When she came to the door he explained my “crime” to her but added that my friend would be willing to let me keep the pigeons for a dollar apiece. My mother instructed me to get the money from the shoebox I used to save money. Two dollars was all I had, and my friend walked away with it.

My friend ended up getting the money he originally asked for. But what is amazing to me from an adult’s vantage point is that I went to school the next day as if nothing had happened. I didn’t hold a grudge. I wasn’t keeping score and thinking of a way to get even. If I thought at all about the incident, it was with relief that I hadn’t gone to jail. Since I hadn’t, life was good, and I kept moving along without the burden of a grudge. The incident was just a bump in the road (or a bob in the stream), and I didn’t fixate on it. Although it was not playful in any conventional sense, I had a playful, acquiescent, wu wei mindset.

If wu wei is play, where is work in this picture? It is in Taoism’s yin-yang affirmation that work and play are complementary rather than mutually exclusive opposites. Each gives shape to the other, just as rocks shape the flow of water while water shapes rocks. Reality unfolds harmoniously as opposites ebb, flow, and intermingle. Thus wu wei may be understood as play but also as work. Sometimes it feels good to work and sometimes it feels good to take the path of least resistance. And sometimes it feels good to feel the aftereffects of one opposite while enjoying the other. We generally say that pleasure is preferable to pain, but think how good it feels to lie in bed at night and feel one’s sore muscles after a long, hard day of work or play. Sometimes, it seems, opposites trade places.

The Challenge of Getting Old

It’s funny how sometimes the moment you long for doesn’t quite deliver. I noticed this some years ago when I was in the army studying Russian at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. Along with other soldiers I had just finished a yearlong course in Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and the three-month course in Texas was meant to round out our training by introducing us to taped recordings of live Russian military radio traffic—tank maneuvers, artillery fire missions, and so on. Unlike the material we had listened to in California, these communications were slurred, slangy, and staticky. My fear was that I would “wash out” of the course and be assigned to a different job in the army. I worked hard, however, and after learning that I had passed my last test, I remembered my vow to celebrate if I passed the course. But instead of feeling victorious, I felt let down. The challenge had evaporated.

Challenges wake us up. Decades ago, I read of a mountain climber rescued by helicopter from the bitter, snowy cold. He froze a foot in the process, had to have it amputated, and learned to walk again with a prosthetic. Soon he was back climbing the same mountain. After descending safely this time from the mountain, a journalist asked him why he chose to go back. “Because life is real up there,” he said.

Among the biggest challenges in modern life is that of dying. People often say they’re not afraid of death but of what might bring it about. We live in an age of “replacement diseases.” Whereas many of our ancestors died at home quickly, now we tend to survive the ailments they died of only to end up in care centers and hospices. But in the economy of the gospel there must be an upside to getting old and feeble. Paul wrote that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). Also, we read in the Old Testament that aged individuals die “full of years” (Genesis 25:8).[23] Full of life experience, all of which carries over into the next world. And this wonderful statement by Joseph Smith: “All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty, I have seen it.”[24]

Old age can resemble a mountain-climbing experience. It is hard going, just as climbing a mountain is, where most of the time we focus exclusively on the steep path one or two steps in front of us. But when we turn around, something wondrous happens: the myopic view of the rocky trail expands panoramically as we look back on the hard climb. In everyday life, however, it can sometimes be hard to turn around and take in the vision. Doubts and fears (“those phantom shapes that haunt and blight the earth”[25]) and other human maladies immobilize us. When he “waxed old, and he saw that he must very soon go the way of all the earth” (Mosiah 1:9), King Benjamin called his people together, admonished them to righteousness, and reminded them that he, like them, “was subject to all manner of infirmities in body and mind” (Mosiah 2:11). Those infirmities can close in on us rapidly and cloud our perception and understanding, notwithstanding our picture-perfect health at the moment.

In 1862 Brigham Young celebrated his sixty-first birthday. Not long before the celebration he spoke of the aging experience, stating that “death is sown in our mortal bodies. The food and drink we partake of are contaminated with the seeds of death, yet we partake of them to extend our lives until our allotted work is finished, when our tabernacle[s], in a state of ripeness, are sown in the earth to produce immortal fruit.” He then added: “Yet, if we live our holy religion and let the Spirit reign, it will not become dull and stupid, but as the body approaches dissolution the spirit takes a firmer hold on that enduring substance behind the veil, drawing from the depths of that eternal Fountain of Light sparkling gems of intelligence which surround the frail and sinking tabernacle with a halo of immortal wisdom.”[26]

This is an inspiring and comforting statement for those of us who have seen loved ones suffer physical and mental decline. The diminishment of our faculties, I believe, will redound to our exaltation, just as all our hurts do if we bear them graciously. Indeed, it seems that we are liberated by the very things that bind and hurt us. As President Young put it, death is the gateway to life. It “is sown in our mortal bodies,” but when they die “in a state of ripeness,” they are “sown in the earth to produce immortal fruit.” As Christ said, the seed that falls into the earth and dies “bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).

Lehi characterized life and death as “a compound in one” and an instance of “opposition in all things.” The only way things can happen for our good is through opposition. Take flight, for example. For millennia humans dreamed of flying like birds, but all attempts were unsuccessful. Even when they attached bird-like wings to their arms, no human was strong enough to flap them vigorously enough to take flight. Our bodies, it seemed, were forever fated to walk the earth. Yet today we fly all the time in heavy machines. How did this come about?

Part of the answer lies in the airplane design (which roughly resembles birds in flight) and engines that propel aircraft fast enough to take off and stay aloft. But none of this would be relevant if there were no resisting medium, nothing to slow planes down and keep them from flying arbitrarily fast. Airplanes are well named not just because they fly in the air but also because air enables their flight even as it resists or opposes it. Airplanes, like birds and flying insects, cannot fly in the frictionless, resistance-free environment of a vacuum.[27]

Friction is a blessing that initially looks like a curse. It drains our energy and tires us out, but were it not there in the first place (were there no oppositional contact between shoe and surface), there would be no push-off and no prospect of movement. It is hard to imagine what life would be like without friction, and without gravity, another feature of reality that glues us to the earth and wears us down. Without these resisting forces, these seeming impediments to our progress, nothing would happen. They are like the eggshells that confine and protect baby birds for a while. Sooner or later, hatching birds peck their way out of their shells while developing the strength, determination, and desire to move and thrive in a new environment. Eventually they learn to fly, and so will we if we let earthly hardships strengthen and prepare us for what comes next.

Notes

[1] “Kick the Can,” season 3, episode 21, aired February 9, 1962.

[2] Albert Einstein, “Da musste etwas hinter den Dingen sein, das tief verborgen war,” in Autobiographical Notes, trans. and ed. Paul Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991), 8.

[3] Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, 9.

[4] Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, 17.

[5] Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Dept, 1854–86), 7:199. Of course, we do not descend as deeply as Christ did; we do not descend into perdition.

[6] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation (New York: Library of America, 2013), 82.

[7] A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games (New York: Summit Books, 1989), 20, 42.

[8] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 3.

[9] Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3 (original emphasis).

[10] “Recollections of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” Juvenile Instructor, 1 Aug 1892, 470–72. Cited in Alexander L. Baugh, “Joseph Smith’s Athletic Nature,” in Joseph Smith: The Prophet, The Man, ed. Susan Easton Black and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1993), 137–50.

[11] Moritz Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” in The Meaning of Life: A Reader, ed. E. D. Klemke and Steven M. Cahn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58. See also pp. 56–65.

[12] Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” 63.

[13] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 39–40.

[14] Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 63.

[15] Hugh W. Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens,” in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1978), 51.

[16] For further explanation and sources, see Sharra Fullersmith, “Lila: Divine Play,” Mahavidya: Scholarly Resources for the Study of Hinduism, December 22, 2017, http://www.mahavidya.ca/2017/12/22/lila-divine-play/.

[17] Speaking of the need for recreation and varied pursuits, Brigham Young stated, “There is not a man in the world but what, if kept at any one branch of business or study, will become like a machine.” In Journal of Discourses, 13:61.

[18] Phyllis Mazzocchi, “Play as Portal to Awakening in the Blithesome Wanderings of Chuang Tzu,” in The Philosophy of Play as Life, ed. Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall, and Malcolm MacLean (London: Routledge, 2018), 26–37.

[19] Alan Watts with Al Chung-liang Huang, Tao: The Watercourse Way (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 16.

[20] Mazzocchi, “Play as Portal,” 28.

[21] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 88.

[22] Watts, Tao, 96–97.

[23] Abraham, for example.

[24] Joseph Smith History, 1838–1856, volume D-1, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/.

[25] T. K. Harvey, “Cupid and Psyche,” LiveJournal, https://numbed-dream.livejournal.com/26730.html.

[26] Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 9:288.

[27] In the eighteenth century, Daniel Bernoulli discovered that air flowing around a bird-shaped wing (one whose upper side is curved and lower side is flat) generates lift on the underside of the wing. This is often cited as the basis for flight. Newton’s third law of motion—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—is also cited, the idea being that when wings are slightly angled upward there is more air pressure on the underside of the wing. Rockets fly in the near-vacuum of outer space by creating their own gases (from their fuel), against which they maneuver. For an interesting discussion of why airplanes fly, see Ed Regis, “The Enigma of Aerodynamic Lift,” Scientific American 322, no. 2 (February 2020): 44–51.