I just got home from three weeks in Mexico with my family, where the Wi-Fi was spotty at best. It was a good time to have crappy service, since my favorite podcast Flightless Bird (in a dead heat with Lovett or Leave It) was on hiatus for most of that time. I adore the host, David Farrier, for being deeply curious about humanity yet totally bashful about himself, skeptical but open to the world, compassionate but judgmental (he’s also exposed some serious bullshit through his newsletter Webworm). Each episode of Flightless Bird is a dive into something inherently American through the eyes of an outsider (David’s from New Zealand). I appreciate the weekly chance to zoom out and reflect on things I assume are givens that are maybe actually totally ridiculous.
While in Mexico, I thought a lot about luxury. As a kid, I didn’t equate the beach with wealth because I lived a block from a huge public beach and went swimming all summer long. As an adult I’ve come to think of access to sandy beaches as a matter of class, in part because I now live on an island where beaches are mostly private (and rocky). In Mexico I see-sawed on the issue, one day witnessing locals selling wares in front of massive new resorts filled with white people, the next day watching hundreds of Mexican tourists playing in the surf together. Some days I’d remain steadfast in the belief that it’s inherently American to think of vacation as a luxury (not untrue), and other days I’d cringe at the thought of my commitment to play-as-critical as I basked in the sun. But I’d always come back to Audre Lorde.
In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde gives permission to go beyond the limits of the world as it is today (or was in the ‘70s when she wrote it). In her incomparable way, she reminds us that not only can we turn away from the “shoulds,” we must:
Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within on which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
This essay validates my experience of the world. I know poets are the sages among us, but since I don’t (yet) identify as one, I regularly replace Lorde’s “poetry” with “play.” I think of play as poetry-for-beginners.
Today in America, play still is a luxury. We’ve relegated it there, insisting “basic” needs like food and shelter and money come first. Not everyone gets to play because we’ve made up all kinds of things out of thin air, like race and capitalism, and then made them very very real. But Lorde is here to remind us we have it wrong—we treat play like a luxury, but it’s an essential, vital, need.
Last year, I read this compelling interview in The Sun. Paul K. Chappell is an Iraq war veteran and Captain who left the military to become a peace educator after witnessing the efficiency with which the military trains humans for war. He realized the same model could be used for peace. Chappell founded The Peace Literacy Institute, a non-profit which develops peace literacy trainings and curricula for ages K-adult.
The interview made me enthusiastic about peace literacy, and I went to an online introductory training last winter. Most lasting has been Chappell’s rubric of the 9 non-physical human needs. He says Maslow’s classic Hierarchy of Needs (which I learned in Psych 101 at community college circa 2007) is complete bullshit (my words), that even Maslow critiqued it as skewed later in life.
Chappell insists there are non-hierarchical things humans need for survival that, though not physical, are just as basic: purpose/meaning, belonging and challenge, to name a few. He asks us to picture someone whose non-physical needs are met vs. someone without them, and to imagine their respective resolve to find food for their family or a roof overhead. No one running on empty can build a life. That life is borne from the fuel of having these non-physical needs met.
I love this framework. Though it deals in psychological and spiritual health, there’s nothing lofty about it. Thus the word “basic.” My favorite non-physical need is transcendence. The word often shows up in Maslow’s pyramid at the apex: we can only “transcend” once all other boxes are checked. Chappell says it’s essential throughout and defines the word as “not an escape from reality, but a way to journey deeper into reality. [It] involves experiencing wonder and awe.”
Moments that take us away from a sense of time. So play.
Your (Optional) Assignment:
In the coming days, pick one of the words below (or another of your own) that you generally think of as a luxury, or something you haven’t “earned” or don’t deserve. Write it down in a spot you see regularly (not inside a book that closes). Every time you read the word, tell yourself: this is not a luxury, it’s a basic human need.
transcendence
timelessness
poetry
play.
DAYDREAMING IS NOT A LUXURY.
Play as necessity, I couldn't agree more! Makes me think about how healing it is for children when they witness adults at play. PS play as "poetry for beginners"--brilliant!