Oakeshott expressed similar sentiments about play in an essay from 1946, “The Voice of Conversation in the Education of Mankind.” Life, he observed there, is like a game of cards. The shuffle and the deal, he wrote, “clearly correspond to something in human life: they are the part-human disposition of the counters to be played with: facts to be accepted, but also to be complained about.” And the play itself? “Do we not play out our days as we play out our cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, exercising such skill as we have, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting it, but more often getting either just the wrong one or misusing such good fortune as comes our way?”

This analogy to life as a game takes us some way toward one understanding of play. Moral conduct inter homines simply is something like this: we understand that certain actions are within bounds while others are inappropriate. We develop a style within these rules–perhaps at times “breaking the rules”–but usually acknowledging them even as we do. The “game” is to live well and generously, aiming at our own happiness and that of others.

But there is also free play, of the sort that children do so well. Play here is an end in itself, undertaken solely for the activity’s intrinsic satisfaction, and without external structure. Children make mud pies, collect bugs, and build forts; they “play” house and school; they dress up in costumes for pure enjoyment. This kind of play delights in the moment without thought for the future. It is directly opposed to the long-term thinking required by investment, saving, and planning.

Both kinds of play are important (game playing and free play), and they are analogies for human activity. Both, moreover, may be opposed to the “work” that occupies so much of most adult lives. They imply a notion of the good life that goes far beyond the satisfactions of achievement and accomplishment that accompany purposeful striving. For again, play makes little sense in that world of utility and work. Its value only becomes clear when we extricate ourselves from the widespread notion–dominant now and perhaps at all times–that seriousness, purpose, and future outcomes are always the most valuable considerations in human action. 

Philosopher George Santayana, writing in The Sense of Beauty, explained the value of play lucidly. “[W]e may measure the degree of happiness and civilization which any race has attained by the proportion of its energy which is devoted to free and generous pursuits, to the adornment of life and the culture of the imagination.” Only in the “spontaneous play of his faculties” does man “[find] himself and his happiness.” 

Given the inherent goodness of play, one might wonder why it is so natural to the young and so rare in adults. We might also consider just what is lost when play is absent from our lives, when the serious, practical activities dominate. Are we really missing anything of importance?

Perhaps many people would say that our loss of play is a normal and natural evolution, a progress from the irresponsibility of childhood to the duties of a full-fledged adult. Play, on such an account, has no profound meaning but is a way to pass the time, a break from the work that is actually meaningful. Oakeshott, Pieper, and Santayana, however, would argue that such people have it exactly backward. Perhaps, indeed, the most immediate, intrinsically satisfying activities are also the noblest for human beings, precisely because they are entirely free from practical, utilitarian considerations. Uselessness may well be a “fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility,” wrote Santayana. Nevertheless, he continued, “things which are done for their own sake are their own justification.”

We might go even further and wonder whether a life without play can be meaningful at all.  Clearly, rest is meaningful as a preparation for work; and work is meaningful for the opportunities it provides for doing something other than or “beyond” work. But in the contemporary world we often forget or fail to see what constitutes that beyond. Santayana did not forget it; and he too called it play. “All who feel the dignity and importance of the things of the imagination, need not hesitate to adopt the classification which designates them as play,” he wrote. “We point out thereby, not that they have no value, but that their value is intrinsic, that in them is one of the sources of all worth.”

Intrinsic value is the essence of play, and perhaps it even offers intimations of immortality. Though we can never escape the constraints of time, we can sometimes act as if time doesn’t rule our lives. Play affords us this interim. A dear friend, a wise Catholic priest, once made the offhand but profound remark that “the thing about the saints is that very few of them had long-term plans.” Would that we all might be more like those saints, following their examples as we affirm, enjoy, and rejoice in what we have so graciously been given.