Why can't I just play without keeping score?

One day Hodja sat by the river with the children, skipping stones. "I win!" shouted a boy, whose stone hopped four times. Hodja frowned, picked up a flat stone, and threw it hard — it sank at once. "Ah," he said, "but I have thrown fewer stones than any of you. Surely that counts for something." The children laughed and went back to skipping without counting at all. Hodja stayed by the river long after, still counting. Here is the truth: competitive play is still play. Nothing wrong with wanting to win. But if every ball you throw, every game you enter, has to end in a winner and a loser, something got lost along the way. Somewhere you learned that moving your body only counts if it proves something. This is not a big problem. It is a small, fixable one. You do not need a new philosophy of leisure. You need one afternoon where you throw something, run somewhere, or bounce a ball, and there is no way to win.