The New Self-Help

Play Is Dangerous. It’s Also Essential.

But the idea that we — and our children — are never really ‘safe’ is hard to live with

This story is part of The New Self-Help: 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century.

Play is not something that we do; it is something that we are. It is the state of consciousness that we are born with, and it gradually diminishes in power as we age, until, as adults, we generally find that we are able to enter and exit this state with ease only if we have practiced.

I started thinking about this, and how as adults we can integrate more play into our sense of selves, a few years ago, when my family and I traveled from New York City to Tokyo. The friend we were visiting introduced us to her favorite adventure playground. Not many foreigners knew about it; she and her kids had a nickname for it: Savage Park.

Its official name is Hanegi Playpark and at first glance, it’s a downward-sloping one-acre patch of dirt and trees. It smelled like smoke because there were three open fires. We stared at the dirt and trees and the structures that were woven around and between them, structures that were clearly not made in any place where safety surfacing had ever been a subject of serious discussion. This was…