seconds: note three

Play alters my sense of time. In play I accept a layering of time as experience unfolds. Of course, I could reorder these vignettes and place them in chronological order, but that is not my experience of play. Even if everything in my life happened along an ordered time line, the layers of my experience draw from disordered time. The advantage we each have is that we can, if we choose, draw on any developmental milestone we already have accomplished. This allows a type of creative flexibility. We can approach a set belief and alter it. We can explore fluid truths. This includes regressing back to a time when we hadn’t learned something yet.

I am reminded of my elementary school self. “I don’t need to know that yet,” was what I told my parents when they tried to teach me something about what we were learning in school. And please don’t ask me when or how I learned read. I was raised on a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read; and to this day I think that book was more about can’t reading.

Now I like to read as many as seven books at once. I discovered that the chaos of several stories layered together often produced unexpected connections among the stories or the plots, or the characters, or the authors, or the settings. This makes me sense the flexibility of truth. When I first heard a Greek Myth retold from the perspective of a victim, supporting a completely different sense of what had occurred, I was spell bound. This revealed the flexibility of truth. Both sides from their perspective were faithful to their truth; and these truths were completely contradictory. How amazing a discovery, truth was not unitary. It formed and reformed around perspective and background. Truth had playful qualities.

seconds: note two and a bit

***
Welcome to the ‘waste bin’ of my story
Scattered about are the italicized Appendices of false starts, branches that proved awkward, some part of which I just couldn’t let go. I created a realm into which to put these pieces that might appeal to some other inner state. I am charmed by the idea of making these words into strings of tiny marks, the suggestion of sense.

I like the notion of a place for left over pieces, because when I play I try to use every little scrap. I use what someone throws away. I’m drawn to what has been cast off. From the start I have recognized the scrap bins of others as a good source of material.

I begin again. I restructure. This time I have moved my initial thoughts to the back of the book to create an original appendix so that the book opens as an invitation to play, rather than a series of thoughts about playing.

I feel disappointed when I can’t play first.

seconds: note two

I have a sore wrist. I sorted buttons from a tin I have had around for a year, sitting on two yoga cushions in my bedroom. It is an old yellow and red slightly dented cylinder advertising a cracker company. I had my doubts about button sorting. I dismissed the activity several times, but the invitation persisted. I can sense that I had to sort those buttons to continue playing the vast puzzle of my life. These buttons now sit divided into four sets. I touched every one of probably a thousand old bits that haven’t been touched in years. 40 years easily, I imagine. That takes me back to a time when I was in elementary school.

The transition from school to home was difficult. I don’t know why. But a habit developed that I sat in a chair in the corner of the kitchen in the afternoon and talked to my mother. There may have been an accounting of my day. There may have been some complaints.

The main idea as I have come to see it was my request for help with what was going to happen next. I had to go through some portal. Her words and my words created a spell, rather than solved a problem.

I wanted help deciding what I would like to do, though in retrospect I didn’t really.

I might have been waiting for her to reveal some secret of our past that would make everything make sense, or perhaps I was waiting for her to reveal some magic ability that would banish doubt and anxiety.

I didn’t think the things my mother proposed were what I wanted to do, but...

Eventually I would get off the chair and go off to play until dinner. At that time I had my own room and a closet with toys. Sometimes I rearranged the closet.

seconds: note one

Friends helped me realize that playing is how I live my adult life. I have always found other ways to proceed and have found when I simply engage in activities, ideas pop into my head about ways to make most activities more playful. There seems to be a constant adjustment to what comes next. Call it an internal wobble.

When I try to write a description of play for someone else, something essential gets left out. Basically we can make anything playful, so the idea of proposing exercises that promote play introduces a problem. The exercise can be playful, but it can also be completed in a fashion that I wouldn’t consider playful. So how do I provide a qualitative difference when it isn’t a matter of what we do, but how we do it? It is about a relationship between an inner and outer world and a consideration of what happens as we proceed. Something already appears in my written voice that separates me from my play state. But here’s what’s next.

As an 18 year old, I first stumbled back on play. It was an unhappy period, finding that what I filled my time with didn’t alleviate my distress. This event came after the time I tried to eat seven Swiss Chocolate bars at once. Well actually I ate them in series and failed to complete the game. Chocolate has never been the same. I’ve never tried that game again with chocolate, but I did try it once with cookies without the dire consequences, except that I can’t buy more than two types of cookies at a time.

One afternoon, I simply began to arrange some objects in a container. I cut some things, and glued some things, and made a kind of collage out of images and text, and small objects. Something unusual happened. I lost all sense of unhappiness, or of completion, and time folded back on itself. I just fell out of the usual parameters and found at the end of the afternoon that I felt fine. I can’t even describe it as feeling better. I removed myself from the measures and checks with which I had usually assessed my state of mind. I had a fine time. I remember few details, though I do know that at one point I checked the time and I still had most of the afternoon in front of me. I felt as though I had been engrossed in my activity for a long time. At another moment I was surprised that an hour passed in what seemed like a moment. I was puzzled and pleased.

A lot of time passed before I had another experience like this one, where time vanished and activity simply unfolded. But something had been revealed, and I chose to call this play. I felt like I had stumbled upon something of great value that I couldn’t accurately describe.

As I have explored this realm, some things seem to help me get there and some things help me stay there. I am pretty sure this is idiosyncratic. But I think the process and certain aspects of the process show up again and again. So I will offer some of these notions and hope that along the way they will provide you with a way into your own play state. I’d really like to encourage you to invite yourself into this realm. And I then encourage you to explore what’s next. Hopefully my descriptions will encourage you to define your own experience more clearly, rather than lead you to expect us to share the same experiences.

a seventh approach: spirit induction one

This text takes inspiration from the timeless quality of playing. This timeless quality always seems to heal some inner imbalance. Aspects of healing extend from physical cuts and scratches to emotional hurts and neglect. It extends to spiritual aspects of living. Thus, this book encourages play, bringing us back into personal balance, exercising basic skills of our inner awareness.

Breathe this book.

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiryThe odd and wonderful thing about play stems from attempts to figure out why we play. Every attempt so far fails to show that any assumption about play holds true. Our bias to favor a deeper value for playful behavior intuitively makes sense, but science doesn’t support any hypothesis we propose. Our problem stems from the need to make sense of something that in its very nature remains senseless. It remains senseless but not unimportant. I hope that after this exploration play still seems senseless, but that that senselessness comes to represent something cherished, however impractical or insubstantial. We can view senseless as without direction, because in this realm of play the value of direction yields to the value of whatever happens in each moment.

a sixth approach: soul induction one

The soul* always plays. Sometimes we forget.









*I use the word soul to refer to that fragment of the universal experience that feels like our personal link to the universe as it folds and unfolds.


I once called my musings Play for the Soul because I found my inquiries into a sense of soul full of similarities with play. A journal entry from 4-24-2003 listed the following associations on what the soul might be.


Soul: hovers outside awareness
Soul; non linear and timeless
Soul: all at once and always
Soul; holds no dual nature; both/and
Soul: in every cell of our body
We can experience Soul concentrated in our body
Soul; continues before and after what we believe in as life
Soul: present rather than known
Soul; can seem absent, though present
We can go through life without connection to Soul
Soul: always in balance; never requires belief in it.
Soul; doesn’t compete.