The boy at the board
Not that long ago I was in York. Nice town. It's got a good city wall to walk around, and a weird little castley thing on a tiny hill.
It also has the Jorvik Viking Centre, which walks you through York's Viking history via a slow-moving chair ride past some animatronic Vikings. It's like that scene in Jurassic Park - except instead of gliding past a cutting-edge DNA-splicing lab, you're trundling past robots in rags pretending to negotiate the price of fish. It's "It's A Small World After All" with less singing and more "oh we've surprised Sven on the toilet."
After the robot bit ends, you're invited to walk around a small exhibition of tools, boats, weapons, and games. It was here I learned about Hnefatafl, a kind of Viking chess/Go hybrid. I confess I didn't read the rules properly, and can't explain the game, but that's not the point . The point is that the museum had a board laid out, ready to play.
While I was reading about the game, a young boy rushed to the board and sat down. With no one sitting across from him, he looked up, hope in his eyes, searching the room for an opponent.
"Would you like to play?" he asked me.
"Thanks bud, but I'm okay for now," I replied, and walked away. I immediately regretted it.
Why had I turned him down? An opportunity to play had presented itself, and instead of saying yes, I shut it down, for no good reason. And I mean that genuinely; on reflection, I couldn't think of a good reason that I had said no. I turned down an opportunity to play without really thinking about it. Somebody extended an invitation to play, my default was to say no, and I did nothing to override that. Worse, even after realising this and feeling like I'd missed an opportunity I didn't go back; I just kept walking away, too embarrassed to go back and ask to play.
I'm not saying there aren't good reasons for not playing, of course. We're not always in the mood, and play isn't always appropriate. But this was a reminder that "not play" is sometimes the default; that we have to actively, consciously "not choose not playfulness", as Bernie De Koven might put it.
In writing this, it's also made me think about the times I have been the boy at the board, hoping someone will sit down to play; hoping that someone won't feel too silly, too weird, too childish, to play with me; hoping, in other words, that someone else will not choose not play.