In a recent conversation about the “Inner Inner City” (see video on my Youtube Channel), my Dutch friend Thys Van der Veer used a Japanese word: “Ikigai.” According to the Wikipedist, ikigai is: “a Japanese concept meaning ‘a reason for being.’ Everyone, according to the Japanese, has an ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. Such a search is regarded as being very important, since it is believed that discovery of one’s ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life.”
I seem to have several ikigais going for me. There’s my family, oh yes. There’s my sense of purpose, which, apparently, is something idiotic like “helping to make the world more fun.” And there’s my current mission: teaching playfulness. Which is what I usually wind up doing – devoting my foreseeable future to teaching what I most want to learn.
So far, I’ve had four different teaching/learning ikigais (I know, you’re only supposed to have one, but that’s me all over). They are, in order of my conceptual evolution: games, play, fun, and now playfulness.
I spent the first decade of my career exploring games, in theater, education, recreation, community celebration. I slowly began to see just about everything in terms of games. I wasn’t alone. Game theory, simulation games (what they now call “serious games”), philosophers (notably Homo Ludens), psychologists (see Games People Play, Golf in the Kingdom, The Ultimate Athlete, the Inner Game books). I wrote an elementary school in social skill development that was a compendium of about a thousand children’s games, organized according to social structure. I built the Games Preserve. Until everything I could think of about just about anything I could frame as a game.
After a while, it seemed to me that what I was really teaching was not so much about games as it was about the art of play. Games were structures, but the content, the heart, was to be found in play. So play became my next ikigai. My book, The Well-Played Game, was a product of my explorations of the game-play connection, and the ascendancy of the centrality of play to my understanding of self and purpose. This allowed me to expand my explorations in many directions: art, of course; business (meeting facilitation and teambuilding), workshops and retreats focusing on the healing and spiritual aspects of participating in a play community (first at the Games Preserve, later at the Esalen Institute). Until everything I could think about just about anything I could frame as play.
My third ikigai was fun: the meaning, the concept, the experience, the facilitation, the dynamics, the significance, the psychology, sociology, politics, the art. Games, play, at their heart, were all about fun. If they weren’t fun, we wouldn’t play games. If it weren’t fun, we wouldn’t play. Fun transcended structures and conventions. It could be experienced, shared, created by anyone. We could have fun with each other, with ourselves, with our bodies and minds and senses, with toys, with sticks and leaves, with art and science and love, oh, yes, with love. I was especially drawn by how little respect the word drew, and yet how powerful of a force it was on our selves and societies. Fun? Feh! You can get all emotional and cosmic when you talk about play; all profound and universal when you talk about games; but fun? So I started this blog, and the Major Fun program to recognize games that were what you might call “easy fun,” and I ran more workshops in helping people find and create fun, and I developed what I called “fun coaching” as a way to help people have more fun, and I consulted on how to make things fun: toys, games, work, family, life.
And now I’m into my fourth ikigai. The playfulness one. Playfulness, it seems to me, takes the idea of fun to the next level. It’s a way of being that encompasses the emotion of fun, the action of play and the concept of game: a way of acting in the world, with the world, a way of interacting with family and community and self, a way of being more open, more responsive, more engaged, more compassionate, happier. The soul of creativity. The heart of art. It’s the path I want to be on, as much as possible. For the time being.
It could be that this was my ikigai all along, and the others were preparation. It could also be that there’s a fifth. Whatever, I figure. Whatever. I bought the domain: playfulpath.com. I just finished an e-book about it. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what to name the book. I decided to call it A Playful Path. (Not the playful path, mind you, just a). For a donation, it’s yours.
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