Cosmic play: experiencing the world through lusory engagement in sailing and surfing

Drawing on Johan Huizinga's and Eugen Fink's notion of the cosmic significance of play, the paper seeks to develop a broad notion of what it means to experience the world through lusory engagement. Based on cases from two nature sports which rely on the winds of the open sea, sailing and surfing, the paper will offer evidence of how practitioners of these sports conceptualize their engagement with wind, water and waves as a dynamic and reciprocal form of cosmic play that continuously emerges anew. In their lusory engagement, sailors and surfers get the chance to experience themselves as being embedded in and inhabiting a larger worldly context which carries and supports them, but which can also challenge and change them. It will be argued that such experiences of the cosmic significance of play raise the awareness of sailors and surfers of being a small part of an interconnected world and, as a result, they may become more prone to paying their respect to and taking care of their worldly habitat and of themselves living in it.