Pat challenges us to take our work less seriously. He speaks directly to me
and to my work as a community planner. It’s important to realize that play
is not ‘anything idle, wasteful or frivolous’. He exclaims, ‘The trivialisation of
play was the work ethic’s most lasting and most regrettable achievement’. I
was encouraged to hear his demand: ‘This is “play” as the great philosophers
understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous
person’.