Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
When I was younger, play looked like sport. I was six when I first laced up football boots, and from that moment I was hooked. It was physical and technical, but it was also something more: it demanded that you pay attention, read the shape of the moment, and respond as part of a team. For the next fifty years I played competitively, sometimes pausing for study or work, but always finding my way back. Cricket had the same pull—less competitive for me, but the same sense of joy hidden inside its rhythms.
But sport wasn’t the only arena for play. There were board games and card games around the kitchen table. There were imaginative adventures that required no equipment at all—running through backyards, diving behind trees, and shouting instructions to friends as if we were soldiers in a world we didn’t yet understand. Growing up in the shadow of Vietnam, we acted out roles we might one day inherit. War ended before conscription reached me, but play was how we tried on adulthood, testing what courage and responsibility might feel like one day.
As I grew older, play changed shape. Words became the new playing field. The pulpit, unexpectedly, became a place of play. Preaching wasn’t performance; it was participation—entering a biblical text with imagination and inviting a congregation to come with me. Every few months I would try something creative just to see what might happen if we put normal conventions to one side. Sometimes the congregation laughed. Sometimes they entered into the experience. Sometimes we found ourselves in a moment that felt larger than all of us, as though we’d stepped inside the story rather than just listened to it.
Writing followed the same impulse. Short stories became places to explore worlds, test possibilities, and ask important questions through story. Playing with narrative, with voice, with character—these were new versions of those childhood games, just without the backyard and the bruises.
Somewhere along the way, I realised that play wasn’t childish, and it certainly wasn’t frivolous. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer calls play a kind of world with its own rules and boundaries. You don’t control it; you enter it. It is a closed world where the external world ceases to exist for a period. You don’t master it; you are mastered by it. In sport, in the pulpit, in writing—there have been moments when I’ve felt exactly that: absorbed, transformed, briefly outside myself.
So do I play in my daily life? Yes—in ways that don’t always look playful at first glance. A sentence can be a game. A sermon can be a doorway. A story can be a field to run in. Play is where I still lose myself, and in losing myself, become part of something that transcends myself.
That, I think, is my playtime now.
The Afterword 
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