I've been listening to Brené Brown's fantastic lectures on The Power of Vulnerability this week. Brown has many great observations, one of which is that people who are easily shame-triggered often also lack aptitude for rest and play.
In our performance-driven society, people spend too much time struggling to check things off their lists. (Guilty as charged!) Productivity has become the currency of self-worth. Being tired has become a status symbol. Most people wake up exhausted and go to bed feeling they have not done enough.
In this context, Brown raises the idea of piddling, something I equate with adult play. It got me thinking about the importance of spending time with yourself and others without a goal other than exploring the possibilities of the moment.
Einstein is said to have come up with his best ideas by daydreaming. He was led to his theory of relativity while imagining chasing a sunbeam to the end of the universe. When you focus solely on your lists, you may get things done. But sometimes the highest value comes from something not on the list. There’s the story of how Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was written. Frost had been working all night on another poem (the long poem, “New Hampshire”). When he finished, he took a break to watch the sunrise, then came back in and wrote one of his most famous poems in a matter of minutes. It’s the poem he felt he would be remembered for.
So, how can we learn to maintain a sense of self-worth when we aren't getting things done, and ensure we find time to play? Children don’t have a problem playing. They enjoy the process, of playing house, building a snowman, or just moving stuff around for no apparent reason. When my daughter plays in her room it’s the opposite of the kind of work I usually do, which feels like an endless struggle just to keep entropy at bay. Play, my daughter reminds me, is the job of the child!
I recall some of the songs I’ve written over the years, in the 90s. I'd get an idea in my head and just start fiddling with the piano or the guitar and the 4-track. A few hours later, I might have recorded something like my song “Lover's Quarrel.” I often lost sleep over spontaneous projects like this, but it sure was fun. (Have a listen below.)
I started off on many life-changing paths by piddling. Piddling even led to my current career in IT, which came from a whim to set up a BBS system in the early 90s, which turned into a full-blown computer habit, which led to landing a job in IT before I had any formal training. Piddling is an amazing teacher.
My tendency to piddle continues to this day. When De La Soul released their catalog on streaming platforms recently, I remembered I had lost my “3 Feet High and Rising” cassette and decided to make my own. I recorded the cassette off Spotify, printed the J-card of the cassette on my black and white printer, then colored it in with my daughter’s colored pencils and pens at her desk. She was delighted to discover me in her room mid-process, cutting out the paper and making the hand-made J-card fit the case. Now, voila, I have a bootlegged De La Soul cassette where I had none before. And believe me, this was not on my list this week.
Writing this Substack started out as piddling. I was looking for something to do in Astrohaus’s Sprinter freewriting tool in Singapore and typed a draft of what became my article on presence. Lately, this Substack has become a bit of a planned task, one I start on Mondays or Tuesdays or when I have an idea. I draft my thoughts into 500 words or so, then revise and publish on Friday nights.
But it’s still a lot like playing because I never know what I’m going to end up with. I don’t write outlines. I start writing and see what happens. When I have enough words or have written for a certain amount of time (about 20 minutes), I stop, and the magic (hopefully) happens in revision.
Some of my best writing has come from experiments to see what ends up on the page.
And here it is, the result of a few minutes of piddling on my Freewrite Traveler at 6 in the morning on a Monday.
If you want to write and are making excuses, stop thinking of writing as work and start thinking of it as play. Start without a goal other than spending a few minutes writing and see what happens.
If you feel up to it, let me know in the comments how it goes.