Last week, three near neighbors whose homes back onto a natural resource area woke to find their birdfeeders and trash bins ravaged. No mere raccoon was strong enough to bend the poles and chew through the feeders. We had a bear in the neighborhood.
An estimated 24,000+ black bears live in Wisconsin, up from 9,000 in 1989. Most live in the north, far from us, but their range is expanding southward. They wander in late spring and early summer to find food and mates. In the past few years, bears have been seen in Madison, Middleton, Waunakee, and Windsor, practically shouting distance from my home. How I’d love to see last week’s vandal! Preferably from a distance and through the window. I still recall with delight watching bears as a child in Yellowstone, before the park changed its practices to reduce bear/human contact and resultant injuries. With reluctance, I must admit it’s probably better for the neighborhood if our midnight visitor has moved on. Image: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
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“It’s clean-up time! It’s clean-up time! Put all the toys away,” the toddlers sang with glee as they moved playthings from the floor into the toybox. In a few years they’ll be sweeping the porch with child-sized brooms. When will they learn to tell work from play? “Need to” from “want to”? The price from the pleasure?
Work is an activity to achieve a goal or result, or a task that has to be done, or both. But is the difference from recreation so clear? I work in the garden to tidy our grounds, but even more to soak up the long-awaited sun and sweet spring air. Don’t some athletes play in part to reach the finals or earn a college scholarship? Some work is arduous, painful, and unavoidable. Some workers must carry that burden for exhausting hours at a stretch. For others of us, including but not limited to writers and artists, the line between work and play is thinner. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, as I recall, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes a building custodian who makes a game of his job by guessing how many minutes each task will take. Next time a week feels encumbered with obligations and appointments, I’ll try to imagine myself an innocent toddler who hasn’t yet tasted from the tree of knowledge of work and play. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. Archives
May 2024
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