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Too many women and men who fixate in the physical aspects of life expect too much of play, partying and sports. Many high schools and colleges abuse their athletically talented young people, sacrificing their intellectual and spiritual development in order to win games and increase the school’s prestige or to make a great deal of money. When the president of the University of Minnesota tried to have first year students kept out of varsity athletics so they could get grounded in study and academic life before competing so ferociously – the rest of the Big Ten Conference presidents wouldn’t even let the discussion appear on the agenda. Even church related universities such as Notre Dame and Southern Methodist succumb, hiring coaches we believe are snake-oil salesmen who devour kids, to keep multimillion dollar per year television contracts for football and basketball games. You can have the highest, most beautifully expressed educational values in the world but the coaches at the big athletic mills understand they must win and make money or be fired. The abuse of student athletes for money and prestige at Southern Methodist University was such an embarrassment, that the United Methodist Church bishop of the area warned SMU’s president he’d have to clean up his act or surrender the Methodist name. SMU’s abuse of their students became impossible for the denomination’s ministers and lay people to accept.
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One of the major problems faced by successful societies that developed a work ethic has been the way many people took life too seriously. From the very beginning there have been grim, even angry and sullen women and men who not only saw life as a sacrifice to be endured with the pain of deprivation but also to be imposed on others lest they have to much joy. Such neurotic persons often condemn anyone who enjoys life more than they do.

May Brannigan was a neighbor in Cincinnati who attended our church when we were pasturing and at in graduate school there. May was a gaunt, religious woman from the poor coal mining region of Kentucky. She had a mind-set that perceived life as a long, dreary battle to survive against the forces of evil. Her life remained grim despite the fact that she and her husband had been well paid through the long post-war boom when Cincinnati was prospering by shipping convoy loads of goods all over the world. May detested the fact that the church kids won the church league softball championship and that Jard played with them. It distressed her deeply that Jard was building a sports racing car in our garage because it was a frivolous activity. To her anything beyond work and worship, beyond prayer and meditation smacked of evil and proved to her that she was far more righteous than we miserable incompetents with whom she had to deal.

May lived and died with little or no joy in her life because she missed one of the major aspects of fulfillment. We humans need an appreciation of life. We must have humor, stimulation and entertainment that carries us beyond our work and family responsibilities. Just as working, worshiping and loving, plus learning and persevering are vital aspects of life, so playing enthusiastically is crucial to consistent satisfaction. Of course, entertainment, like the other five major areas of Logotherapy satisfaction must be kept in perspective in order to be effective when we focus our powers along lines of excellence. You can understand why some of our ancestors had trouble accepting play as an integral and legitimate aspect of life. In a pre-fossil fuel world, there was almost no surplus. Every person needed to work hard, to labor almost without ceasing, in order to survive the next bad harvest.

Even the Bible speaks of days of toil and only hours of ease. Life was nasty, brutish and short because starvation was quite possible and disease lurked constantly. The struggle to survive gave many a grim view of life that lasted as recently in history as our own grandparents’ time. Certainly a cruel fate that sent pillaging Yankees, swarms of insects to devour the South’s crops and endless labor in the devastated post-Civil War lost Confederate society, shaped Jard’s maternal grandfather’s grim mind-set. And Roberta’s grandmother lived all her life with a tough, no nonsense Colorado frontier life-theme in which Indians, Mexicans and Blacks were despised because they competed for resources. Nevertheless, normal men and women have always found time to enjoy life as much as possible even when they had to connect their games to productive work.

From Amish barn-raisings in the American mid-west, to Louisiana quilting bees and Australasian sheep shearing meets, people came together and worked while also dinning and dancing and playing communal games. The scene in Colleen McCullough’s novel THORNBIRDS, where the sheep shearing crew stops work to watch a contest between two gun shearers was quite common. Unfortunately, the grim Puritans, stern Victorians and their descendents never seemed to wonder why every society made their food taste as good as possible and enjoyed talking and singing around dinner tables when the people were relaxing after their labors. They were being completely human in a way the Puritans never understood.

RECREATIONAL PLAY — Life is filled with opportunities to recharge our batteries through entertainment and games. A fascinating event from American history makes the importance of play quite clear. In the westward trek across the continent to Oregon in the early 1850s, two large wagon trains of pioneers with all their possessions left Saint Louis for the Pacific coast. The people drove teams of huge, gentle-eyed oxen to pull their great Studebaker and Conestoga prairie schooners westward ten miles each day. Today, there is a lovely hilltop rest and recreation area beside Interstate 80 in Nebraska on the site they had to reach by July 4th in order to stay on schedule in the crossing of the Great Plains between Missouri and the Rocky Mountains.

As the two trains formed up on the edge of the sea of grass for the crossing, their respective wagon-masters asked each group to vote whether they would travel six days a week or seven over the fifteen hundred mile crossing of the Great Plains. It wasn’t an academic question for they couldn’t start before the spring grass was high enough to feed the animals and they must cross through the mountain passes before the autumn snows blocked their passage. Should they reach the mountains too late to cross they’d starve for their wagons couldn’t carry enough supplies for two years. And should they get trapped in the passes, they’d freeze as did the Donner Party just a winter or so earlier. They voted with a sense of urgency!

One group chose to travel every day – to take no chances at being caught short the other group, voted to travel six days a week and to rest on Sunday. They would, they decided, conduct a communal worship service, rest the animals, mend the equipment, put on a potluck dinner and whoop it up with a square dance around the campfires every Saturday night. Life, they said, was too short not to enjoy once in a while on the dangerous journey they were making.

Many of the people in the seven day group called them foolish, lazy and possible suicidal. Honest, hard-working men and women weren’t frivolous, they said, but took their responsibilities seriously. No doubt, someone brought up the parable of the ant and the grasshopper. They’d never risk disaster in the pursuit of pleasure while on the trail. Didn’t the other group know how dangerous that was? What could be more dangerous, the six day people countered, than crossing a thousand miles of Sioux and Cheyenne territory armed with nothing but a few rifles for protection? Only their courage and the grace of God would get them through, so why not rest and enjoy life once in a while. The two trains started west within a day or so of each other and sure enough, the seven day train pulled steadily ahead at seventy miles per week rather than sixty — ten miles, twenty miles, thirty miles into the distance as the weeks passed.

For two months, the six day train held to its resolve to worship, to work, to rest and to play although some people started grumbling that they should also switch to traveling every day. Then, about halfway across the Great Plains, near the present Nebraska rest stop, their wagon master pointed out that the leading train’s campfire ashes were no longer ten miles apart. It was slowing down; not doing as well as the people had planned. The six day train closed the gap, passed the seven day train and reached the mountain passes two weeks before it. More important – their animals were strong and ready for spring plowing, the equipment in good shape, the kids all healthy and the old folks sprightly. By taking time to worship and to play, by enjoying life and each other – by being more completely human rather than workaholic automatons, they’d done better for themselves over the long haul.And it is indeed the long journey to which we as authentic persons must be committed. Recreational play, kept in perspective with the rest of a focused life, greatly improves our satisfaction.

SELF FOCUS

WHAT FORM OF PLAY AND RELAXATION DO YOU ENGAGE IN TO RECHARGE YOUR BATTERIES FOR THE LONG JOURNEY OF LIFE?

HOW DO YOU KEEP YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES AND RECREATION IN BALANCE?

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