Article July 1, 1922 Issue

Work and Play

PAUL STARK SEELEY

What is work; and what is play? They are mental classifications of human life and action. Play usually has a sense of freedom, joy, and pleasure associated with it. In it there is a considerable absence of fear, burden, or stress; while there is much spontaneity, naturalness, and less self-consciousness. Work, on the other hand, often seems to carry with it a heavy sense of necessity and compulsion. We have to do it! Perhaps we are afraid not to; and we may fear we shall not do it well and will be accordingly penalized; or we may even rebel at having to do it at all. It may seem almost to bristle with unpleasantness and difficulties.

But why should this state of thought be? Is there any compelling reason? Surely such a mental state never originated with God, the source of all intelligence, the source of all true life and action. In such thinking is no expression of wisdom, intelligence, or love. Christian Science shows the difficulty to be simply a wrong sense of selfhood, which can be readily displaced by a truer and happier sense of life and our place in it. The worker, be his work mental or physical, is entitled to be as joyous about his daily tasks as is the little girl with her jumping rope or dolls, the boy absorbed with his marbles or baseball, or the adult freely enjoying his tennis or golf. This freedom from a sense of burden in our work can be accomplished simply by a change of our mental processes, which is the only method of salvation from any discordant condition.

Christian Science presents to us the spiritual or God-appointed standard of manhood as the one standard by which we must measure our thinking; for it alone is dependable, and ever true. Christian Science continually turns our thought to God, Mind, divine Principle, Love, as the present and constant controller of our lives and our destiny, our work and our play. No condition of real life or action, it shows us, can be outside of the infinite God. Mrs. Eddy writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 3) that God "guides every event of our careers." There is no distinction here between work and play. The statement is unqualified and all-inclusive.

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