Play is a Beach
play as an ever-changing space - as a coastline changes over miles and time.
Along mile after mile of coastline, the land presents a changing face towards the sea. Now it is a sheer rock cliff; now a smooth beach; now the frayed edge of a mangrove swamp. dark and full of mystery. Each is the seacoast, yet each is itself, like no other in time or place. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach
Rachel Carson. Lost Woods
Rachel Carson wrote this in 1958, a North American biologist, and I think it is a meaningful thought to entertain today in a society that is constantly trying to compartmentalise teaching, learning and maybe even our very human-ness. This quote implies to me the complexity of being human, and our need to not only recognise that we are all different, but that even over time we are constantly changing. The idea of the beach also fascinates me from the perspective of land and water - where exactly is the change from land to water? I think back to the tidal beaches of my childhood where two thirds of the beach would be submerged at high tide... and the joy of exploring the tidal pools when the sea receded again.
The coastline is changing, over the millennia it changes as land rises and sinks, tectonic plates shift and climates have changed, over recent years due to natural forces or human alterations, and also during each day due to weather and the pull of the moon.
Things get washed up on the beach, some things get pulled into the ocean and washed up somewhere else.
So many nuances and changes and yet so few of us actually spend the time considering this complexity other than the binary of land and sea.
Are we at sea if we are ankle deep? Or are we on land?
And maybe this is the same with play - that too often it is being described as the dichotomy of play or learning, and those liminal spaces between the both are ignored. The dawn and the dusk, the hundred shades of greys between the black and the white. The more I reflect on this, the more I think that humanity dwells in these spaces, and that pushing us to choose one or the other, or compartmentalise our lives with divisive lines is making us less human.
Sometimes the play is hard to ignore, it is loud and tempestuous like a stormy sea. Other times it goes almost unnoticed because it is just there doing its thing and passers-by are too busy with their own thoughts to pay much attention to it. I was busy writing this before chatting with Carol Garboden Murray and she lifted the idea of the mundane and how so many things in life are not valued, respected or even noticed because they are considered too mundane. I mentioned to her what I was writing and we went on to discuss how maybe we need to consider celebrating the “mundane” or the everyday - those small daily things that previously go unnoticed - it has definitely been a large part of my #slowdown #lookclosely #listendeeply approach to viewing the world.
Does this mean that as adults we are only noticing the extraordinary play? The stormy days and the “instagrammable” moments? Just as the news on TV and in the newspapers focuses on the tragedies, and if we are lucky the success of some people - and that our everyday way of living and caring goes unshared? Surely we are more than wars, politics and sporting achievements?
There is a need to value all the play and not just some of the play. To learn how to be unhurried so that we can notice the reality of our lives - within preschools and schools and also within society at large.
In Swedish there is a word “studiero” that gets used a lot for creating good learning environments - it translates as study peace or study tranquility or study quietness. It mostly gets used in the context that classrooms should be quiet. But, what would happen if studiero meant that we are unhurried enough to learn deeply, and that we could have “lekro” - play tranquility/peace too? That it was not about being quiet and finishing assignments - but about finding flow in our learning and our play and that they supported each other. That the peace was experienced by the adults to avoid annihilating flow - and that the flow was better recognised and scaffolded in all its manifestations and not just the silent and still kind.
I had to pause and re read your passage to begin to understand it’s complexities derived from the quote and your thinking. “Unhurried enough to learn deeply - without adults disrupting the flow of learning, while recognizing the different forms of flow - not just the silent and still type.” Adults should apply this 'practice' into their lives too.