When Are We Finally Going to Play?

A short story by Martin Christen

The Lego carpet had been lying on the floor of my room for days. A landscape of coloured bricks, roads, houses, bridges – a work that was never finished, because it was never meant to be finished. I knelt in the middle of it, completely absorbed, searching through the chaos for exactly the right piece for exactly the right spot. The world around me did not exist.

When the boy from next door came to visit – which my mother always welcomed warmly – he would find the brick landscape exciting at first. We built together, added to it, extended it. But after about two hours, he would grow restless. At some point, he would ask the question that baffled me every time:

«When are we finally going to play?»

I didn’t understand what he was talking about. We were playing the whole time. What we were doing – building, designing, creating a world – was, to me, playing in its purest form. I put all my concentration into it. What else could there possibly be?

The same in the sandpit behind the house. My father knew where to get the best sand – malleable, moist sand that could be piled into mountains, through which you could dig tunnels and carve roads. The neighbourhood children would often gather at our place because of it. But here too, my favourite activity was the building itself: first a mountain as high as possible in the middle, then roads and tunnels winding around it and through it, farms in the flatlands, bridges over imaginary rivers. Building all of this required patience, craftsmanship, and artistry. I could spend hours at it.

And again, after a while, the same question: «When are we finally going to play?»

For my playmate, playing meant making up a story and acting it out with figures and cars on the finished layout. For me, playing meant creating that layout in the first place. And when it was finished – if it ever was – I no longer knew what to do with it.

As a teenager, my father gave me an electronics experiment kit. Resistors, transistors, diodes, breadboards, short cables – and a thick experiment manual with dozens of circuits. I loved losing myself in it: learning how to make a light bulb flash, how a button activates a function, and, as the crowning achievement, a real radio receiver that could actually pick up broadcasts. My father, an electrical engineer by profession, deliberately encouraged this interest. I was the only one of his four children to have inherited his technical flair.

When I later gave my stepson the same experiment kit, I noticed the difference immediately. He glanced at the table of contents, had me show him how to build the alarm system – and from that point on, wanted to use only that one function. That you could learn and discover so much more with it didn’t interest him. He saw the usefulness of one particular set of instructions. I had always seen the process, never the end product.

It had always been that way. And for a long time, I thought that was simply my nature – introverted, turned inward, happiest alone with my projects.

But then I think of my mother. She was torn, I believe. On the one hand, she did see my focus as something valuable. On the other, she was afraid I might become isolated, and pushed me to spend more time with the neighbourhood children. Ronny, who lived a few houses away, was not to her liking – too doubtful an environment. In my teenage years, she prevented me from going to evening parties with classmates. The only party I was allowed to attend was that of an unpopular classmate, the headmaster’s son, where I ended up being almost the only guest.

In this way, she stamped me as a loner – and in doing so, at least in part, made me into what I was supposed to be.

To this day, I don’t know exactly where the line lies. Was I introverted by nature – someone who finds happiness in stillness and in process? Or did I become so, because the world around me kept pushing me into that role?

Perhaps that is also the wrong question. Perhaps I am both – and the one has grown so deeply into the other that they can no longer be separated.