Yin-Yang of Work & Play
- Apparent
- Sailing is play that happens to involve hard work.
- True
- Work and play each contain the other. “Work hard, play hard” is just drudgery alternating with debauchery.
Sailing is play with lots of hard work: both physical and mental. It requires brute strength and dexterity, deliberate focused concentration and passive observation.
It mirrors my best work, which is full of play. It’s creative: making connections. It’s convivial, full of energy and enthusiasm. It’s autotelic: done for its own sake.
Laborious play and ludic work both lead to flow states: when we are fully immersed and engaged in an activity that challenges our skills and abilities. We lose self-consciousness, gain senses of control and efficacy, plus immediate feedback we then adapt to.
This counters our culture’s typical work-play juxtapositions. Those who claim to “work hard and play hard” usually mean they swing back and forth between drudgery and debauchery. At best, it entails the gamification of everyday tasks: which is just a playful veneer over a slogging reality.
This work within play—and play within work—embodies the Yin-Yang concept: everything is made up of competing, yet complementary forces. While these forces oppose each other, they are not necessarily opposite, as each contains an aspect of the other. For example, there cannot be a shadow without light.
And shadow likely led to this insight. The symbol graphs the daily progress of a pole’s shadow length during the year. Think of the sail-shaped plate on a sundial. (In the west, we call it a “gnomon”, rooted via carpentry, in the term for “one that discerns or examines, interpreter, expert”. It’s about knowing—or “Lore”.)
On the water, we can see and experience such interactions: the morning fog (Yin) gets dissipated by the heat of the sun (Yang); and that Yang, like a hot summer day, is more likely to bring the Yin of a sudden thunderstorm.
Sailing embodies this dynamic equilibrium. Most fundamentally, in our sails, we see the pair of pairs: thrust v. drag, lift v. weight in the four fundamental forces of aerodynamics. We balance headsail and foresails. We experience the above-water perpendicular force of wind on the sail complementing the below-the-water opposing force on the keel.
Sailing not only balances play with hard work. Each of those balances the physical and then mental. And each of those in turn are balances: brute strength (Yang) and dexterity (Yin), deliberate focused concentration (Yang) and passive observation (Yin).