I want to close this week with a word about play.
I am always looking for meaning. I consistently interpret my experiences through the lens of significance and I make every effort to integrate those insights into my perspective and out through my language. I am an observer and an interpreter of meaning and it is a quality I genuinely value about myself.
It is also a place where I can get stuck. When overused, my bias for meaning can get heavy, a little too serious and a little too much work. I have been perceived as intense and brooding. When my idealism takes a blow, when it feels like meaning can’t be found, I do know that my darker qualities emerge. In other words, I take myself too damn seriously.
And the antidote to that seriousness is play. Frankly, the key to learning, the key to creativity, the key to relationships is the spirit and practice of play.
This week I have invited you to make friends with your obstacles, to declare yourself worthy of investment, to find the shelter to restore and protect what matters, and to reach deeper into the unknown possibility of yourself than you may have before. None of this – none of it – requires grim determination or depressed isolation. In fact, it suffers from it.
We always get to choose how we feel. Always. The more we choose the energy of possibility and the awakening of discovery, the more we equip ourselves to lighten our grip and open our hearts.
The playground is waiting.
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world, especially the parts where he doesn’t handle it very well.
