Deludia

Importance of Play

I talk about my robots fairly often here. They have become a large part of how I spend my days. For me, it’s easy to while away the hours caught up in a fantasy-like world of construction. I can spend long moment just looking at the robots as they slowly come to life, and think about what I can do to make them better.

Part of it is the construction, certainly. Like an enthusiast of model building, there’s a challenge in assembling the parts, getting them just so, and then doing the same with the next part.

But I think there is an unconscious component in this as well. I a building little bodies. These small devices have thought and autonomy, and can set out on their own to explore, experience, and report back their findings. In a way, I am building little partial versions of myself that are able to do the things I cannot do anymore, or are too painful to do. Plus they are an outlet of my personality, their functions set up to mimic my particular approaches to the things I make them to do.

I read a science fiction story years ago. I don’t recall the author, which is too bad. It was a great story and well written. It was about the ability to clone our minds, rather than our bodies. We could download our knowledge and personalities into different kinds of devices which were made for all sorts of functions. They had machines that could go under water to the deepest depths of the ocean. They could travel in space and visit and explore planets, and they could be so small they could be injected into a human blood stream and roam the body like the submariners of Fantastic Voyage. And when they were done, all of their experiences could be uploaded back into you so that their experiences and memories would be yours. It opened vistas of right life experience that wouldn’t ordinarily be available.

My robots are a small portion of that, I think. Not that I have the hubris to claim my robots are so capable. The depths of the ocean would crush my little machines, space would freeze them, and they certainly can’t upload their experiences and emotions of their trips. I can merely watch through video eyes to get a first person view of what they encounter.

But they do widen my world and give it more meaning that I’d have without them. Then too their very design and creation are ratification that I am still a capable person, able to set a course and steer it successfully. I recently finished my first real robot, it’s a tracked vehicle much like a bulldozer that knows how to find it’s way about and avoid the various obstacles and impediments to its progress. Today I have the basics of a 4 Wheel Drive robot beginning to take shape on my desk. My plans for it are a lot more extensive than my first attempt. Waiting in the wings is a third robot, and it will be even more sophisticated in it’s abilities. I have already bought the parts and even as I work on the second robot, I am thinking of the third.

My disability may, in many ways, isolate me from the happening about me. But my robots help defer the focus on on my plight, replacing those thoughts with creative ones. Whether on the grand scale my robots ever amount to anything significant or not, they will be and have been significant to me.

Disabled people needn’t all build robots. But having an occupation for one’s time is profoundly important to maintaining a stable attitude as we cruise our lives from here to there. It isn’t a panacea, deflecting all of the negative emotions that the disabled must do battle with so consistently. But it’s a start and a good idea that proves the importance of play.