ppendages i-vii, four wrist watches

Enhancing Exercise #3: Personal Play Contour

Play like memory unfolds in an individual way. The contour of the experience can have a quality that someone else can recognize. The pace
can follow a familiar cadence. Certain events can lead in and out of the activity. Memories themselves can form integral aspects of play. Someone can play alone; someone else, in a group. Some like to play with very specific rules, while others like to guess and make things up. Some even play games and walk away from an unfinished game and return later to continue the experience. Make it up.

It helps to consider that we all have different temperaments. Based on factors of temperament, we all experience the same world differently. We could almost say that we experience different worlds simultaneously. If we simply divide people’s temperament into categories, we discover things about how we experience the world. Temperament scales in themselves introduce inaccurate ways of discerning difference, but they give a method for highlighting difference.Like with much of science, we posit a hypothesis in order to observe something more carefully. Eventually that enhanced credibility has to be released based on a new understanding of the world.

The Myers Briggs Personality Test or the Kiersy Temperament Sorter use a series of preferences to describe temperament. Using four aspects of human experience on a continuum, we can roughly group individuals by how they make decisions in their environment. The first consideration looks a how an individual experiences social interaction. On a continuum social interaction energizes a person or depletes energy. A second consideration addresses how information gathering takes place. On a continuum some collect details while others follow the gist of the information and leap to “accurate” conclusions.


The third consideration compares the inner process of thinking through with the process of feeling through it. Finally we consider when a process completes itself either by holding it open or by closing it up.

It seems like it becomes easier for people to play, if their temperament favors an open-ended outcome. To initiate play it seems helpful to use intuitive leaps. Although thinking remains important, at times we have to go with a feeling and discover where it leads. In this manner it becomes easier for some people based on their temperament to play than for others. If we get energy from social interaction then we probably play better with others. Though it seems more likely that depending on the type of play activity the role of playmates will vary. The nature of the play brings in energy when we chose activities that replenish us. Probably movement within the realm of imagination becomes easier, if we use feelings rather than thoughts to guide us.

None-the-less, most people play as children with active imagination independent of what gets described as temperament.

So it seems like the description given above might account for those for whom play resumes more easily. But ideally no one excludes anyone else from playing. In fact I imagine with attention to spin we could describe patterns of access to play for everyone.

Describe playing. Would a close friend agree? Test the description out using the four previous considerations. Did we describe activities that replenish energy? Did we describe things that we do by feeling our way? Did we describe activities that cause us to make leaps? And did we describe things we leave open? Collect descriptions.

Exercise the other aspect of temperament that we access less easily. Try this:

I; Find an activity that exhausts and one that gives energy. Schedule them back-to-back in series and gently explore the energy flow.