Can't Beat Imagination with a Stick
Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 3:50PM 
THREE YEARS AGO IT WAS THE CARDBOARD BOX. THURSDAY IT WAS THE STICK. And I was glad to hear it. The National Toy Hall of Fame inducted the stick into its showcase of classic toys this week. Media around the world ran the news. Curator Christopher Bensch told the Associated Press “It’s very open-ended, all-natural, the perfect price — there aren’t any rules or instructions for its use.”
As I morph into a middle-aged curmudgeon I’m getting cynical about the degree to which the landscape of play seems to have shifted from exploring possibility to attaining mastery. Cardboard boxes, sticks and their timeless brethren engage active forms of imagination and fantasy. Video games and similar digitized, mechanized, and battery “operatized” toys of the computer age, in my opinion, are mostly passive in nature and are less about spurring the mind to ideas than they are about achieving top scores, advanced levels, and outcomes defined by the manufacturer. (There are exceptions, of course. I like what I’ve seen of the Wii, and its ability to engage active personal expression into an experience otherwise controlled by those who designed it.)
Like a lot of people I’m having trouble sleeping at night because the economy might as well be a car without brakes careening down Lombard Street, but I hope there will be a sliver of silver lining coming from it. Perhaps the gifts of the upcoming giving season, thinned of expensive consoles, handhelds, and modules by shrinking household budgets, will be rounded out with classics of creative play. I’m not suggesting we give our kith and kin boxes and sticks. But books, musical instruments and magic tricks (the staples of my youth); leather kits, paint boxes and chemistry sets; scrapbooks, cameras, and journals; footballs, bikes and skateboards; Scrabble games, sewing machines, and puppet theaters. Sounds quaint doesn’t it? Perhaps, but the most creative people I know recall how such simple things became broad wheels to steer the great ships of their imaginations.
In an era when innovation is considered the primary currency of business I don’t see this as nostalgia. Imaginative play will always be relevant. Simple things remain great catalysts for creativity. I don’t want my future and younger colleagues to come to work showing off the mastery of a particular skill so much as I want them to know how to do great things with very little, how to imagine something designed for one use being yoked for another chore entirely, how to explore the possibility of an idea.
It’s not a bad way to approach leisure time either.
My good friend Jerry recently emailed me about his weekend, one spent largely outside with his beautiful children, Hope and Gianni. While they played Jerry found a small tree limb on the ground. It had a natural crook in it that suggested something functional. So there in his Midwestern, middle class, 21st century suburban backyard, Jerry whittled a walking stick.
“Not a bad Saturday,” he wrote.
What were the “sticks” of your youth? I’d like to hear your comments about creative play and how it affected you.
© 2008 John Armato
Reader Comments (7)
Hi, John -- good post. It seems like once a week my wife and I have a conversation about video games, usually after one of our kids comes home from a friends house talking about what they did on the Wii.
In the end, though, we remind ourselves of how they'll wake up early and play Life or Monopoly together. Or reading. Or sitting round the kitchen table drawing and coloring. Or exploring their homework.
In the end, we've decided, there just isn't enough time in the day for video games...
Lucia spent some time with us last week, and when I gave her some pictures to color, she said she wanted plain paper, so she could draw her own pictures.
Hey, I played Scrabble with Joshua last weekend and kicked his butt. However, it happened to be a downloadable version of Scrabble on his iPod.... We played over the table at a restaurant while we waited for our food.
I have to admit, it made it a lot more portable and there were no lost or scattered letter blocks on the floor.
My stick was a fragrant lilac bush in the back yard. It was quite large with a spacious, circular pad of earth in the middle, in which I could hide from the world. It was my genie's bottle, my crow’s nest, my lecturn and stage (complete with thousands of adoring fans), my office, you name it. It's still there, behind the house where my family has lived since 1927...although my brother has since annihilated it with the clippers.
Other memorable sticks include a rusted hood of a VW bug, a redbud tree, a wooden spoon, my mother's hair scarves, and the lid to my grandmother's trash can.
Wow! Appreciate all the great comments. Nice to hear about "sticks and boxes" past and present.