I decided to hide from my taskmasters today and take a play day. I was thinking of childhood afternoons when I would splay out on the earth, watching a world unfold in the grass. Of the approximately 26,000 days allotted to our kind, we probably have, on the average, fewer than a thousand that are play days, days in which we are free to choose after we wake up what we would like to do. Most of these occur before we are twelve, and after we are sixty. Between twelve and sixty life tends to be a soul-shattering succession of duties, appointments and schedules.
Children are natural intimates of the ground.
But they rise as soon as they can. Let go of the hand of a three-year old, however, and she is as likely to dive to the ground as to run away, even if that ground is the middle of a hard floor in the busiest concourse of a mall. To her a prone posture means security, food, dreams, play. It takes years to reconnect these positive experiences with stimuli that are higher than two feet above the ground. Once adults are uncoupled from the earth, the rewiring seems permanent.