We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.
Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently open-ended, without purpose or end goal, governed not by the will to win a point but by the willingness to surrender to a locus of experience and be transformed by it.
Maria Popova
Wonder, Play, and How to Be More Alive
More synchronicities this week, this time from a post by Maria Popova on her website The Marginalian.
Her quote above perfectly embodies the type of “play” I’ve been seeking for quite some time.
It isn’t trivial or frivolous.
It is deep.
It requires us to step outside of ourselves, exploring new territories of being.
If I could describe the paradox of the experience, it is one in which to be transformed by the experience, one has to be willing to give up the security of knowing it before you’ve lived it.
Even then, based upon what I have lived over the past couple of decades, there is not even a guarantee that one will understand, know, and make sense of the experience fully even after one has lived it for quite some time.
It’s strange.
It’s like you’re following a quest that is amazing and full of wonders but it seems never-ending.
Thus you never reach an endpoint where you’re able to step outside of it, look at it externally, and fully know it.
You’re always within “the locus of the experience” instead.
And somehow that experience transforms you…just by being open to the playful experience of it.
This is what I mean when I say this experience feels like “The Adventure of Your Life.”