Of Work and Joy

“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.