I happen to be a lover of archery. But I don't like archery for killing things. I like it
as a sport. But what I like most of all is to set an arrow free, like it were a bird.
You know, when it gets far up in the sky, eeee, you watch it, and it suddenly turns and drops.
What is it that fascinates us about that? Because it's not useful. It doesn't really achieve
anything that we would call pervasive work. It simply is what we call play. But in our culture,
we make an extremely rigid division between work and play. You're supposed to work in order to earn enough money to give you sufficient leisure time for something entirely different called having
fun or play. And this is the most ridiculous division of things. Because everything that we
do, however tough it is, however strange, can be turned into the same kind of play as I will show
you.
Let's,for example, take the situation that I ran into a little while ago. I was in the subway,
and I wanted to get my shoes shined. And here was this fellow who was making shoeshine a real art.
He got his cloth, you know, which you spread out like this, and he was going over my shoe.
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, like that.
See?
He was dancing while he was working. And he had just the same fascination in shining
shoes.
Imagine, too, if you were a bus driver. A bus driver is ordinarily considered an absolutely harassed person. He's got to watch out for all the laws, all the competing traffic, the cops, the people coming on board, giving their fares,and he has to give them change. And if he has it in his head that this is work, it will be hell.But let's suppose, he has a different thing in his head. Supposing he has the idea that moving this enormous conveyance through complicated traffic is a very, very subtle game, and he has the same feeling about it that you might have if you were playing the guitar or dancing.
And so he goes through that traffic, avoiding this and avoiding that, and taking a fare like this,
and he makes a music of the whole thing. Well, he's not going to be tired out at the end of the
day. He's going to be full of energy when he gets through his job.
See you're not under compulsion all the time. You know, when I was a little boy and went to school ,I had to learn the piano. They called it playing the piano. But actually, they said you must play.We had compulsory games. They used to post notices on the bulletin board in the
school where I went to, which said, this afternoon, everyone will go for a run. And if you didn't go
for a run, and it was found out that you hadn't, you were flogged. So everybody hated going for
a run. Because they were under compulsion to play. Everybody must play. It's like the whole game of life we're all involved in. It's only a game, but everybody has got to belong. So we went running.
I remember one day I was out on a run, and I was trying to enjoy myself because I was running on the balls of my feet, dancing along. And a fellow came up behind me who was running on his heels. He was jogging. And he was going, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump. And I said, hey, what's the matter with you? You're running on your heels. You're jarring your whole body all the way through. Okay, but he stuck to it. And he became the champion long distance runner of the school. But he didn't enjoy it. It was work. And all he enjoyed was the suffering that he endured that made him feel that he had really contributed to the human race, because he suffered so much. He identified his existence and his worth with his suffering. Now, really great runners dance when they run. They don't necessarily follow a straight course. They may weave.
And in the same way, if you happen to witness in the year 1970, the World Cup team from Brazil
played soccer in the most extraordinary way. They played it like basketball. They played it dancing. The way we learned soccer in school when I was a boy was very, very formal and orderly. And we didn't really know that you can do everything you have to do in this spirit. Don't make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you're doing as play. And don't
imagine for one minute that you've got to be serious enough.
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