an antidote to weltschmerz

how cultivating play can change your day and maybe even your entire outlook

dear friends,

Even if you don’t know any German, there’s a pretty good chance that you know Weltschmerz. It’s that feeling of hopelessness and dread about the state of the world. It can be a constant low-level sense of unease that greets you first thing in the morning or it can show up out of the blue as a surprise Weltschmerz attack during an otherwise normal day: you get a call from a cousin living in a place where bombs are being dropped, or you catch the news about children in Texas with measles, maybe it hits when you get a text from your best friend who lost his job with the National Park Service. Or, perhaps, you feel a surge of it at the grocery store when you pay for eggs while the latest clip on your phone displays politicians partying with billionaires.

Yeah, things are distinctly not good. But, as they say, one day at a time. There are days, though, when even that seems like a tall order.

When I was hit with another Weltschmerz attack a few weeks ago, I stopped. Literally. I sat with all the awfulness. My grasping brain tried to find silver linings and reasons to downplay what is happening, but the rose-colored stories I was telling myself were not particularly persuasive. As I sat in the quiet with my world pain, though, my mind slowly settled. What emerged was the sense that I needed an antidote. Something that I could do everyday to remind me of the goodness, the joy, the love that is already here. Something that would invite me to that field Rumi writes about, the field out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. Something that would help get me through this day and the next, without giving up, giving in, or becoming a terrible grouch.

What exactly can do all that? Play. Seriously. If we want to cultivate our ability to meet the moment whatever that moment is, there’s nothing like it. When we engage wholeheartedly in an activity we enjoy, we tap into a deep well of curiosity, resolve, creativity, and energy. I think we’re actually hardwired to work this way because I have never not seen this power when a person is truly engaged in a fun-for-them activity: my brother prepares elaborate meals that often require days of simmering sauces and late nights of chopping, taste-testing, and cleaning; my daughter spends hours coming up with long strings of numbers to guide her knitting projects; a friend, who takes his skiing very seriously, strapped on an avalanche beacon for a particular run in Hokkaido.

Hours of meticulous repetitive work? Afternoons writing out knitting notes? Risking an avalanche?

Yep. All of it with smiles, at least much of the time. When we play, we can handle all sorts of challenges because we’re in a space of curiosity and creativity. We don’t see the world through the lens of problems to be solved, but through the lens of experience that can help us play better. And when we’re able to view life through this lens of play, we can do almost anything.

Okay, that was a crazy long preamble. The practice, happily, is breathtakingly short and simple:

(1) Tune in to your sense of play. What is fun for you is utterly unique, so please make sure to be ruthlessly honest with yourself because the only way this works is if you feel it. Like with so may gentle practices, this one is grounded in connecting our emotional and mental states with our physical being. For me, I know that I’ve touched on something I truly find fun when I sense a pleasant fluttering in my belly. It’s the same feeling I had as a kid just before jumping off a cliff into deep water on a hot summer day.

If you already play, fantastic! If you don’t immediately know your own play sense, imagine different activities you enjoyed as a kid: climbing trees, drawing, playing baseball, riding your bike, reading, taking a radio apart, baking brownies, listening to music nobody likes but you, playing solitaire. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, it just matters that you have fun doing it.

(2) Commit to five minutes of playtime every day. If you have more time, that’s even better, but for now just start with five because it’s eminently doable. When I started this practice, I chose activities I otherwise was not planning to do that day. Quickly, though, I realized that, with intention, I could slip into that same sense of play for a lot of things I already do. This may sound silly, but the effect is pretty amazing. This week, for example, I decided I would turn my time on my mat (yoga, barre, pilates) into my play time. Okay, there is no objective difference between this week’s yoga and last week’s, but my attitude during my practice transformed my time on the mat. Literally, I became a more playful yogi: I tried new approaches to poses I’ve been doing for years, I laughed when I wobbled, I smiled. I wasn’t looking for problems, I was looking to have more fun.

(3) Play! At first, your play time may be a respite from the rest of your day, but rather quickly, you’ll find that the energy of play starts popping up in other parts of your life. And, because good play always includes a challenge to overcome, that energy will shift how you perceive and approach obstacles. I noticed this shift in my thinking when a project I thought was going to be simple and straightforward turned out to be neither. To make matters worse, the problems were technical in nature, making them particularly frustrating for me. But, instead of letting my inner grouch take over, a playful part stepped forward. Sure, I still had to go through all the tedious steps of handling the problems, but because I was in the mindset of someone playing, I took the challenge as part of the game. I don’t know that I was necessarily faster or more efficient because I was in a playful state of mind, but I’ll tell you the entire process was much more fun than had I grumbled the whole time.

That’s it for this week! If you want some further inspiration, I highly recommend reading both The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu and The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.

with love, as always,

alison

p.s.

Here’s the poem “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing” by Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.