The young often do their hardest work in
play. With interest, the most repellent tasks become pure sport, as in
the case Johnson reports of a man who wanted a pile of stone thrown
into a ditch and, by kindling a fire in the ditch and pretending the
stones were buckets of water, the heavy and long-shirked job was done
by tired boys with shouting and enthusiasm. Play, from one aspect of
it, is superfluous energy over and above what is necessary to digest,
breathe, keep the heart and organic processes going; and most children
who can not play, if they have opportunity, can neither study nor work
without overdrawing their resources of vitality. Bible psychology
conceives the fall of man as the necessity of doing things without
zest, and this is not only ever repeated but now greatly emphasized
when youth leaves the sheltered paradise of play to grind in the mills
of modern industrial civilization. The curse is overcome only by those
who come to love their tasks and redeem their toil again to play.
Play, hardly less than work, can be to utter exhaustion; and because
it draws upon older stores and strata of psycho-physic impulsion its
exhaustion may even more completely drain our kinetic resources, if it
is too abandoned or prolonged.
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