We like close calls, tight races. In baseball, for example, second base is exactly ninety feet from first base. Were the bases five feet closer together, almost every runner would be able to steal second. Were they five feet farther apart, hardly any runner would make it. We have chosen the precise distance that creates the greatest chance of a close call.
Colors become warmer, more vivid.
A delicious suspense heightens all our senses. The player on first base takes off for second. The catcher stands and fires the ball, and time slows down as the runner slides into second only a split second before the ball. No wonder, then, that our best myths and dramas as well as our best games involve precarious moments of suspense during which all seems lost and then, somehow, against all odds, is saved. If so, how sad it is, as we leave childhood behind, that we are taught in countless explicit and implicit ways to work hard rather than to play joyfully.