Play is our contact with our love for life. It brings us back into our joy at being alive and shows us where our freedom is. Play moves us out of our fixed mindsets: it offers freedom from the tyranny of habit, freedom from the mundane and ordinary, from the rational and need to know and be in control. It is freedom from rigid identification with race, class, gender, and even species.
Nothing is more difficult than prayer. In all other tasks of spiritual life, however exacting, one can sometimes rest, but there is no rest in prayer, up to the end of one's life.