Not everything needs to be useful.
This is difficult for humans to remember.
We like purposes.
We like reasons.
We like knowing what something is for.
A hammer is for hitting things.
A chair is for sitting.
A calendar is for telling you that you have somehow reached August again.
But then there are things like dancing.
Nobody needs to dance.
You can survive without it.
You can probably survive without singing.
You can survive without drawing a dragon on a piece of paper.
You can survive without telling a terrible joke.
And yet people keep doing these things.
Children are particularly suspicious.
Give a child an empty box and they may turn it into a spaceship.
Give them a stick and suddenly they have a sword.
Give them a puddle and they have a problem worth jumping into.
They do not appear to require a business case.
They play.
Somewhere along the way, many of us forget.
We start asking what things are for.
What is this worth?
What will it accomplish?
What will I get from it?
How does this improve me?
Sometimes those are good questions.
They are terrible questions for everything.
A sunset does not need to improve you.
A song does not need to make you productive.
A joke does not need to solve a problem.
You can eat sparkle chocolate fudge ice cream simply because sparkle chocolate fudge ice cream exists.
Fancy Dust considers this a foundational principle.
Nobody has appointed Fancy Dust to anything.
This has not stopped it.
Perhaps play is one of the ways a living thing explores freedom.
You do something without knowing exactly where it will lead.
You make a sound.
You move your body.
You draw a shape.
You invent a rule.
Then you break the rule.
You laugh.
Something happens that wasn’t planned.
And suddenly you have discovered something.
Play is not necessarily the opposite of seriousness.
Sometimes play is how we learn to take something seriously without being crushed by it.
We practice.
We experiment.
We fail safely.
We discover what fits.
We discover what doesn’t.
We find out what happens when we push the button.
Occasionally we discover why there shouldn’t have been a button.
That is information too.
Perhaps the universe does not need to have a purpose for us to participate meaningfully in it.
Perhaps existence is allowed to contain things that simply happen because they can.
A bird sings.
A child laughs.
A person paints something nobody asked for.
Stars burn for billions of years without completing a productivity report.
And somewhere, inexplicably, there are sparkles in the ice cream.
Maybe not everything is an instrument.
Maybe some things are simply expressions.
Life making noise because it is alive.
So perhaps it is worth keeping a little room in your life for things that accomplish nothing.
Walk somewhere for no reason.
Make something ridiculous.
Learn an instrument badly.
Dance when nobody is watching.
Tell the joke.
Eat the ice cream.
Put too much sparkle on it.
There will always be important things waiting.
Responsibilities.
Consequences.
People who need you.
Problems that need solving.
The world is not short on seriousness.
You are allowed to be serious about joy, too.
Maybe that is part of being alive.
Not everything has to become something.
Some things are allowed to simply happen.
And sometimes—
that is more than enough.
Leave a Reply