To see yourself requires a mirror, and I often use other people as mirrors.
Today I had coffee with someone I’d never met, but as he was recommended by someone I respect, I came to our meeting wide open to what I might encounter. And after an hour and a half of interesting back-and-forth, I left with a clear image of who I am and what I believe.
Here’s how it works. Listening to other people talk about themselves generates thoughts and emotions in me that resonate with what I believe. The best conversations, like the one I had today, either challenge my beliefs and spur me to consider new points of view or they remind me of core beliefs that have gotten paved over in the rush to make a living. Today was the latter. The resonance, the challenge or remembrance, happens all the time in conversation, but it often passes without people recognizing it as a reflection of their own beliefs. Seeing your reflection in the comparison of your beliefs to the beliefs of others is how to find your edges and limits. Knowing your limits is important: growth is to step beyond your limited beliefs into a new, expanded territory. My friend Jerry calls your beliefs your “maps”, and your maps define the limits of your world. That idea resonates with me.
So the next time you’re in conversation with someone, pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. These are reflections, not of that person, but of what you believe and who you are in that moment.
Adult life is serious business that demands no fooling around in order to survive and thrive. Play is for children, at least that's what they tell us. Dr. Stuart Brown has a different idea. Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, Stuart Brown first recognized the importance of play by discovering its absence in the life stories of murderers and felony drunken drivers. His years of clinical practice affirmed the importance and need for healthy play throughout the human life cycle, and his later evaluation of highly creative individuals revealed the centrality of playfulness to their success and well-being. This TED video, shot in May 2008, is worth watching. Here are four passages that resonated with me:
Play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams...
The opposite of play in not work, it's depression. If you think about life without play–no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy–try and imagine a culture or life, adult or otherwise, without play. The thing that is unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole life...
The basis of human trust is established through play signals, and we begin to lose those signals, cultural and otherwise, as adults...
I would encourage you all to engage, not in the work/play differential where you set aside time to play, but where your life becomes infused, minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kind of play and I think you'll have a better, more empowered life...
I love creative work because it requires play. Thinking "outside the box" is play expanding the game beyond previously determined borders to explore new territory and connect previously unconnected ideas. Play to me is like air. I need it to survive.
