The Healing Power of Children's Games

(Below is an article I stumbled across that I wrote years ago. Since I’m indeed about to “get out of town” as I prepare a trip to Australia, Taiwan and Macau, I don’t have time at the moment to tell about the 42^nd New Year’s Walk with friends and family we did yesterday nor praise the active life my friends in their 70’s are leading. So here are some thoughts from years back that actually relate to that active life.)

 

Old Man Mosie, sick in the head,

Called for the doctor and the doctor said.

“Please step forward, turn around,

Do the Hokey Pokey and

Get out of town!”

 

“We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse,” is the provocative title of psychologist James Hillman’s and writer Michael Ventura’s equally provocative book. Mostly a series of conversations between them, the theme comes down to this:

 

Psychotherapy in too many cases has been an attempt to normalize an individual’s behavior so that they adjust smoothly to the mainstream culture. But what if that culture is the one that is sick? Does it make sense to adjust to bad living?

 

Case in point: Kids who ran freely in the woods for hundreds of thousands of years are trapped inside the four-walls of a desk-rowed classroom and forced to sit and answer questions few of them ever asked—or need to ask. If they show a normal child’s energy level, they’re slapped with a label called ADD/ ADHD, given drugs that mess with their brain chemistry and grow up thinking that there’s something wrong with them rather than this completely artificial construct that goes against the grain of everything we know about how the brain, body and heart work. Whether that knowledge comes from neuroscientists, visionary educators, observant parents or wise grandparents, it’s clear that the 99% of the problem is more from the adults’ unrealistic expectations than the kids neural wiring. 

 

Hillman and Ventura venture deep into this territory, suggesting that the world is suffering from a “soul sickness” that neither Prozac, intense complaints on the couch about your mother nor any of the other “therapies-du-jour“ can alone cure.  At the end of the matter, there is nothing to fix or cure, just the potential of a deep healing when we start to live well in company with others who choose to live well. 

 

And so Old Man Mosie! Such wise advice! 

 

“Step forward.” Begin to move out from your limited and stuck point of view.

 

“Turn around.” 360 degrees. See what’s around you and what the world has to offer, all the things you miss when you just walk forward and don’t look back. And now worse than ever, the things you’re miss when walking with your head down buried in your device. 

 

“Do the Hokey Pokey!” Who doesn’t feel more alive, more connected, more vibrant during and after dancing? The scientists will talk about the oxygen that comes to the brain during exercise, the glucose, the happy endorphins and neurotransmitters release, the party folks will remind you that your isolation can become self-imposed and stop being so damn serious, come out with us and shake your booty!!  And the poets will remind you, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Worth considering.

 

“Get out of town.” Travel alone won’t help. Especially these days with your phone constantly in your hand, the next Starbucks right around the corner, the conspiracy to make each place like every other place—familiar, comfortable, convenient, the very things that start to erode depth of culture. But make no mistake about it. The hordes of young college graduates who used to flock to Europe to “learn how to live” from the Italians or Spanish or Parisians or Greeks did not come back the same people. And then the map expanded to Bali and India and Japan and the Andes and West Africa and Mexico and…well, you get the idea. Whole new ways to live this life, complete with yoga, Zen meditation, West African drumming, Himalaya or Andes trekking or Turkish steam baths.All still available if you don’t bring too much of your old “sick-in-the-head-self” with you. 

And no, you don’t have to film yourself dancing the Hokey Pokey in each spot and put it on Facebook.

 Just enjoy.