Playing catch

We were in a shop in St. John when a t-shirt caught my eye. In large letters, the shirt said

We don't stop playing because we grow old;
We grow old because we stop playing.

I stood there staring at that shirt, because the line was familiar from a David Roth song on his Think Twice album, “Playing Catch,” which asks

Did I stop playing because I grew older,

Or have I grown older because I stopped playing?

When we returned to New York, as I packed the shirt to send to David, I began to wish that I had bought one for myself. And that thought took me to searching for one on-line, which led me to explore the origins of that line.

It turns out that this line goes back at least one hundred years, but the actual authorship is unclear. According to G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904), the line was included in a book by Karl Gross published in 1896, Die Spiele der Thiere (The Play of Animals). Gross wrote,

Die Thiere spielen nicht, weil sie jung sind, sondern sie haben eine Jugend, weil sie spielen müssen

(The animals do not play because they are young, but they have a youth because they must play.)

The line has been variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr. or Jr.), Herbert Spencer, and George Bernard Shaw, but Gross is apparently the original source.

Whatever the origins, it is a wonderful thought, and as he always does, David eloquently worked it into his song. Click on the link below, and enjoy!

Love,

Rebecca

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2iIonzFMTqGZjdLb1BCQzI3WUk/edit?usp=sharing