Of playfulness and the magical

I am always on the lookout for signs of playfulness - on the Web, in the world. Recently, I found this:

"Life is playfulness...we need to play so that we can rediscover the magical around us."

It was a quote, attributed to Flora Colao.

I was so drawn by this poetic and perceptive connection between playfulness and the sense of the magical that I had to find out more about the author of the quote. Fortunately, with a little computer-assisted magicalness, I found her on Facebook. I wrote her. She replied:

"In 1991, I was asked to write an essay about the meaning of life for Life Magazine when they were doing a book called the Reflections in words and pictures on Why We Are Here, The Meaning of Life. I am a social worker and a therapist by profession. Most of my work at that time was with traumatized children (children who were abused, were victims of or witnessed crimes, had terrible losses or who were in accidents). My work experience was that play therapy was the most healing thing for those children. When I thought about my own life experience as well as my work experience I came to the conclusion that life is playfulness and wrote from that perspective."

What a conclusion to reach. What a powerful truth to have come to. Life is playfulness. When we are playful, we are most alive. When we are playful, we rediscover the magical, we are ourselves magicians.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith