Exuberance: The Passion for Life (9 page)

“
Inasmuch as new objects may always be advantageous,” wrote William James, “it is better that an animal should not
absolutely
fear them.” It is important to explore new objects, he went on, and to ascertain “what they may be likely to bring forth.” In that light, James suggested, some “
susceptibility for being excited [by novelty] must form the instinctive basis of all human curiosity.” Both play and exploration are intrinsically motivated behaviors, and they have in common many elements of curiosity and inquisitive behavior toward new objects and situations. “
It’s cat and monkey spirit,” said Eugene Walter in
Milking the Moon
. “Let’s see what’s over there. Let’s just have a look.”

But there are differences between play and exploration.
The systems in the brain that govern them appear to be relatively distinct, and exploration tends to occur prior to play, and in new environments. Play is more likely only after objects or circumstances have been explored and become at least somewhat familiar. Mood is also different during play and exploration—more joyful during the former, more serious during the latter. The exuberance of play is, in some respects, a joyous improvisation on the knowledge newly acquired through exploration.

Humans, who spend at least one fifth of their lives in childhood and adolescence, are uniquely playful and exploratory animals. When young, we run out into the world, regard and grapple with what we find, and absorb into our lives that which we have newly seen or felt. The freshness of these experiences lingers and insinuates: “
There was a child went forth every day,” wrote Walt Whitman in
Leaves of Grass:
“And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, / And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, / Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.” Everything the child sees or feels, said Whitman, becomes part of him: early lilacs, water plants, the horizon’s edge, the fragrance of a salt marsh. Everything he touches or plays with or explores becomes a part of who he will be.

A child is impressionable by nature, and made more lastingly so through play. Studies of children find that memory is sharper as a result of playing and that play increases performance on a variety of measures of intelligence. In many respects, as Bernd Heinrich suggests in his study of ravens, play is quite similar to the workings of intelligence. It is, Heinrich writes, “
an acting out of options, among which the best can then be chosen, strengthened, or facilitated in the future.” But whereas the maneuverings of intellect are abstract, in play the options are played out overtly. Play, a substantial body of research has shown, promotes flexibility in children’s thinking and behavior, much as it appears to increase the behavioral options available to other young animals. The playwright James Barrie expressed a similar idea in a letter he wrote to the boys who had been his inspiration for
Peter Pan
. “
One by one,” he said, “as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe, you reached the tree of knowledge.”

The more playful the child, psychologists find, the more creativity he or she is likely to demonstrate.
Highly creative children and adolescents are far more playful than their highly intelligent
but less creative peers. Play appears to exert a particularly strong effect on
children’s ability to produce flexible and original associations when they are shown an object or placed in a new setting.
The level of elation affects the imaginativeness of play. The more joyful and exuberant the child is while playing, the more creative the structure and content of the play itself.

Psychologists who study children have discovered
two dimensions of play that are directly relevant to the concept of exuberant play. “Physical spontaneity” refers to the high-energy physical activity level shown in running, skipping, hopping, and jumping about. Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College and the author of
Gifted Children
, observes that exuberance, especially of the sort found in highly gifted children, is often
first and most strikingly apparent as high energy during infancy. Parents of gifted children, Winner finds, report that their children, even when very young, were unusually active, slept far less than other children, and were exceptionally alert and curious. She believes this drive is a stable one, a characteristic that carries on into and characterizes the adult lives of those who are exuberant and creative.

“Manifest joy,” on the other hand, refers to a child’s expression of enjoyment during play; that is, the child’s level of enthusiasm and exuberance. Manifest joy, like physical spontaneity, is a persistent trait; if a child scores high on this measure in kindergarten he or she is very likely to score high on it in high school (and almost certainly beyond high school as well, although this has not been studied in a systematic way). The centrality of elated mood to playfulness has been demonstrated in many investigations.

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity. This is a lesson too often lost on competitive parents and educators. The average school-age child in the United States, it has been estimated,
now has 40 percent less free time than twenty years ago. Recess has been entirely eliminated in many elementary schools, and lawsuits have brought a “safe” sterility to the equipment on most playgrounds. Chemistry kits explode less often, but they are also a bit less magical. Long lazy days of just “messing about” are now filled with lessons, and games so structured as to teach little of what could be more interestingly and originally learned in wide-open roughhousing and aimless exploration.

It is essential to explore wild places, to expect that hazard will exist in most interesting places and circumstances, and to not be so fearful of injury or germs as to make childhood a shell of what it should be. “
It is better to have a broken bone than a broken spirit,” as one opponent of “safe” playgrounds has put it. Children need to be given a long lead to explore and the encouragement to play heedlessly and exuberantly with other children; to make painful mistakes; to fall down, lollop, get lost in the woods, run madly about. They need to galumph.

We all need both wild woods and sheltered riverbanks. Complex environments allow for complex play and probing. Like the brains of the wild trout and caged mice, our brains will acquire the complexity to which we are exposed. Exuberant play thrusts us into more elaborated and wonderful worlds, and the delight we take in such worlds kindles, in turn, a desire to persist in play and exploration.

Exuberant playfulness ends for many with childhood or adolescence. For others it remains. Margaret Mead, for one, was intrigued by this. “
I am interested,” she wrote, “in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game.” Or, as T. H. Huxley said, the ability to perceive
the world anew, the temperament “to face nature like a child.” This exuberance, this freshness and playfulness of mind and mood, the capacity to galumph, are surely things to try to hold on to.
It was said of John Muir that he never grew old, that he retained throughout his life a “
child heart.” And Theodore Roosevelt, at the age of fifty-five, was still a wildly enthusiastic man and utterly determined to help map the unexplored River of Doubt, which flows through the Amazonian rain forest. “I have to go,” he said. “
It’s my last chance to be a boy!” (He did go. It was a trip of Rooseveltian proportions, fraught with poisonous snakes, equatorial fevers, violent rapids, insanity, and drownings. The expedition was high drama from beginning to end, and in the end, perhaps not surprisingly, the river was renamed Rio Roosevelt.) Nothing, in fact, was able to kill Roosevelt’s passionate enthusiasm until the death of his son Quentin in World War I. Then, a friend of his noted, “
the boy in him had died.”

To keep alive the exuberance of youth is to keep alive the possibilities of imagination and play. “Each morning I am something new,” sings the young girl in Delmore Schwartz’s poem:

The young girl instinctively shields her joy from the adults who have forgotten or left behind that which she knows so clearly to be true. Childhood is not the only province of discovery and exuberance, but it is perhaps the most natural.

(photo credit 4.1)

A
lways childhood ends. Nearly always, the unrestrained exuberance of youth ends with it. The kite is wound in, wonder shades into familiarity, and the skipping stops. Restraint accrues slowly, giving way to greater sophistication and savoir-faire. Childhood enthusiasm forfeits a portion of its charm: more and more it is to be dampened or subtly honed, kept to oneself,
remolded into more worldly intimations of pleasure. The rising expectations of life exact a toll from the young as they are obliged to face them.

It is fortunate that the muting of exuberance is neither rapid nor absolute. Youth is, after all, a time to fly and fall on enthusiasm, to act with audacity. The world of the young is meant for scuttling about and, as we have seen, nature gives the time and means for this. Evolution invests heavily in the child’s long days of eager adventure, reaping its returns in the adult’s more informed sallyings forth of mind and body. But youth does it first and with greater abandon. This is the time, as Robert Louis Stevenson has it, to go “
flashing from one end of the world to the other.” It is a rash and full and delighting time.

Yet youth is a confusing, disturbing time as well. Emotions are inconstant and hard to sort through. Exuberant moods swing into darker ones, often ferociously and without apparent reason. Acquaintances differ greatly in character and temperament, and it is not clear how to respond to the differences or whom to trust. Play and other activities of childhood provide some experience for navigating these straits, but more is needed. Someone, a Virgil or a Merlin, is required to help guide the young through the emotional terrain they will encounter; someone to enchant and enthrall; someone to lay out the geography of the child’s imagination, to provide an introduction to the bewildering array of personalities and situations likely to be met; someone to make sense of the discord and to help put conflicting emotions into meaningful perspective; someone to sort out friend from foe, valuable enthusiasm from folly. Experience will do this to some extent, of course, and so will watching and learning from the actions of those who are older. But writers, too, chart the minds and feelings of children; they draw up imaginary worlds for the young and fill those lands with hopes and dangers, discord and adventure, so that children might explore
them under the protection of imagination before having to take them on in reality.

These inventors of worlds are the great writers of children’s stories—Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, E. B. White, A. A. Milne, Walter R. Brooks, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Louisa May Alcott, and L. Frank Baum, among others—and they lay out brilliantly the anxieties and possibilities of youth, able to do so at least partly because they themselves had such ready access to their own experiences as children. Max Beerbohm wrote that James Barrie, the creator of
Peter Pan
, “
stripped off himself the last remnants of a pretense of maturity.… Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, a man of genius. He is something even more rare—a child who, by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him.” Barrie himself said it somewhat differently: “
I think one remains the same person throughout [life], merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and me.” And: “
Perhaps we do change; except a little something in us which is no larger than a mote in the eye, and that, like it, dances in front of us beguiling us all our days. I cannot cut the hair by which it hangs.” Kenneth Grahame, who wrote
The Wind in the Willows
, remarked to a friend, “
I can still remember everything I felt then; the part of my brain I used from four till about seven can never have altered.”