Love occasionally arrives with flowers. More often, it arrives as a parenthetical remark that means nothing to the rest of the room and everything to one person.
It arrives wearing shades. It invents a biography for the family dog. It sends you a photograph of a potato because the potato bears suspicious resemblance to someone you both know. It remembers the exact word you mispronounced eleven years ago and has preserved it, with great care, as part of the new vernacular.
We usually describe love through its serious forms: loyalty, patience, tenderness, protection, devotion. These expressions deserve their place in the hierachy of felt and expressed love. Yet affection also has a lighter register. We tease gently. We invent private words. We reenact old stories with increasingly inaccurate details. We make ordinary objects speak to us, on command. And at times, inconveniently. Like Google or Siri easedropping and then responding to our conversation. Whoopsie.
We dance badly in kitchens. We sing at the top of our lungs. We aren’t sappy, but we soften with a recognition that we trust the person enough to become briefly ridiculous in their presence.
Most of all, it says: Come into this little world, we have orange soda.
The Invitation Inside Play
A child hands you an empty cup and tells you it contains tea. The cup is empty in one sense and completely full in another. Accepting the tea means accepting the child's temporary arrangement of reality. For the next few minutes, the cup has contents, the stuffed bear has opinions, and everyone must behave accordingly.
This is one of our earliest forms of intellectual hospitality.
The child is offering access to an imagined world. Your participation communicates more than approval of the game. It tells the child that the world inside their mind is worth exploring.
Adults continue making these invitations, although we learn to disguise them. We call them banter, nicknames, traditions, hobbies, impressions, flirtation, fandoms, running jokes, wordplay, stories, games, and the inexplicable voices we use when speaking on behalf of our pets.
The form changes, but the invitation is still open.
Throughout Happy Thoughts Travel Fast, I have treated humor as a way of noticing, thinking, reframing, and connecting. Humor creates an opening in ordinary reality through which another arrangement becomes visible. A stressful event can also contain absurdity. An appliance can acquire hidden motives.
On that note, I kid you not, my dishwasher has ADHD. It waits all darn day to wash the dishes, and then does them at the last minute, beeping right after I retire to my chambers for the evening. Annoying af. But on its defense, it was manufactured across jurisdictions and has some identity issues. I think it wanted to be a washing machine so it could have a dryer companion for life. This is another reason to recycle. We might be helping some appliance merge with other components, achieving a lifelong dream. I digress.
A philosophical problem can be approached through Snow White, Pac-Man, waffles, Wi-Fi, or a stick figure trying to understand existence. The archive repeately places discovery and laughter close together, at the point where the "ah-ha" meets the "ha-ha".
Play is the wider field in which this kind of humor hangs out. It allows us to rearrange the familiar long enough to see it again.
The Big Red Heart
R46 Stick Figures began as simple drawings and developed a distinctive identity over time. Their most important addition was a BIG RED HEART. Their faces remained absent so that readers could project themselves into the figures without the constraints ordinarily placed upon age, race, gender, profession, or social position. Their apparent simplicity leaves room for the reader's imagination to complete the picture.
The picture is simple, but it is not empty. Its few elements are combined in a definitive way. The line, the posture, the surrounding objects, and the heart together project a possible state of affairs. The reader recognizes enough of the structure to enter it. That combo explains something important about play as love. The open figure says, There is room for you here. The heart says, You're safe to enter.
A successful comic requires the reader to complete it. The drawing provides the conditions, while recognition supplies the joke. Loving play works similarly. One person offers a possibility. The other understands the invitation and joins.
A punchline completed in another person's laughter is a small act of mutual understanding.
Coming Up Next
In my next article, I'll jump into what the brain is doing while we play, and describe the top six ways people play.
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