Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.
We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.
You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.
Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.
Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."
If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.
No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.
Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.
If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.
The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.
This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn't mean that you get what you want.
The playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It's rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.
Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.
Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.
There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities.
I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.
It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.
There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.
If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.
It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.
There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.
Once you get yourself on that path where you're willing to find something delightful in laundry and in dishwashers, it means that you train yourself to be able to find it almost anywhere in almost anything.
Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?
The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family."
We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?
You don't want to be told, "Hey, do whatever you want." That's what we think of when we think of play. It's the thing where you get to do whatever you come up with in your own mind, all bets are off, there's no boundaries.
We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow.
I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.
We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself.
When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.
Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.
Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.
You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?
Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.
There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.