“Playfulness is another concrete function of aesthetic life. Although playfulness is difficult to pin down conceptually, we all recognize what happens to other features of a person’s act-consciousness if the moment of frolic is missing. If your body health has no play to it, you can seldom be impulsive and you will simply miss the physical laughter of fooling around. If your feelings miss out on vitamins of playfulness, then you tend to feel inhibited or defensive and are likely restricted to feeling back directly toward whatever is disturbing because your feelings can’t play with it a while, … If your skill lacks play it remains closed down to the bare room of getting-things-done-well, for which one can indeed be thankful; but skill-performance which acts as if fantasy and hoy do not exist has little protection against becoming mere manipulation of instruments, whether that he playing the piano with flawless, metronomically wooden notes or delivering a message to somebody as if you were fixing a flat tire. Competence without flare can be very boring.” - C. Seerveld. How true.
