A Life Principal

I am not buying that

When I was young I played with dirt, rocks, sticks and sand

and I made worlds for my plastic animals and cars to dwell.

It was all called play, but at the time I worked at making the worlds 

a little bit better each time I engaged in the activity.

I think I can say that this is where my passion for building and creating

began: the sandbox.

The computer age was a whole new sandbox or place to play.

I have spent many hours exploring its applications to music, sound,

video and photography. The image above is a combination of two 

photographs. They are colorized, layered, cropped, smeared and had 

different filters added to them. I did this time and time again. The 

thought I keep coming to is, was this work or play? If I ever sell this 

image it becomes labeled as work, because I made a profit. As it lives 

here in the computer world (never having been printed) can it be called 

artwork or is it artplay? Even my computer spell check recognizes the 

word artwork but not artplay. I just added it to my dictionary. I will be 

contacting Mr. Webster. 

My whole struggle is play gets a bad rap. I see play as the foundation 

or starting point of work. You play with something until you build enough 

skill to consider it work. Then the word practice enters in. So maybe the 

life progression is play, practice, work. I guess what I am advocating for 

is a life long continual return to play. I believe it is important for the 

grown-up community to constantly find new experiences of play.

Life principal #(not yet established) - Find new materials to play with 

in a non-competitive manner. An activity that brings you joy with no 

specific result. That is Play.

jeffkimsey-carroll.com