Transitional Objects & Binaries

Wow, the second week of the play seminar -- the readings, activities, events -- left my brain and heart so full. I don't know where to begin. I won't even try to capture everything I'm thinking and feeling about all of it. That's just impossible. I do want to note that this was the week of our surprise opportunity to have visiting candidate for the open senior faculty position in Learning Sciences, play scholar Artin Goncu, as a visitor/participant in our play seminar. How wonderful. His story of his upbringing as an Armenian Christian boy who grew up a child of hard-working parents in Turkey, living next to families of middle-class and higher incomes, where he and his siblings had  little play, and no toys in their childhoods, being visited in the U.S. as an adult by his parents, with the father presenting him with the stuffed camel a year before his dad died. Uhh. We were nearly all in tears. It really brought home how these issues of our childhood remain with us throughout our lives, they never leave us, ever. We never can leave that past behind us. He also reminded us of Winnicott's very early work that is too often, I believe, dismissed about 'transitional objects' and how they can help us connect. They are the physical manifestations of our emotions, whether we be small children or adults. How many of us have important mementos of our childhood that bring us instantly back to some memory or more importantly, some feeling, maybe of safety or of love or of a better place or time?

I was also doing a lot of thinking about the notions of opposites or binaries and how often we define things, as Sutton-Smith talks about in his preface, by what they are not. Like, play is the opposite of depression, or it is whatever is not work. Or it is...whatever it is...it is the oppostite of something else, like the monks he mentions scribbling in the marginalia of texts in Umberto Echo's The Name of the Rose, a book I really loved. I thought about this in the context of Libba's blog and struggle as an artist who thought her art would be her play last week, while that became torture and it was what happened in the everyday events of her life in which she 'found' play. I thought of this in the discussion in class of Kate using her "George Clooney" to help her bake, where others thought anything to do with cooking or baking was work or drudgery whereas for Kate it was pure delight and her face radiated with passion and joy when she spoke of it. There are no opposites of play on some binary scale, perhaps, right? At least not a scale that would work for all individuals.

I've done a lot of thinking about Martin Seligman's work on well-being versus happiness. To me, I no longer really believe in happiness, not after losing my son. But instead, I search for well-being and do find moments of joy and times in which I feel good and can say that I am 'happy' versus 'sad.' But happiness as a state is elusive and something that I don't think is necessary to have a good and healthy life; nor does Seligman, which I was very glad to see. The real human condition, and all that real people face throughout life makes living in such a state difficult to attain and makes some of us feel miserable when it is set up as some sort of goal that we must achieve. 'The pursuit of happiness...'