Introducing Serious and Silly

1. In the Dentist Office - wherein I discover the Inner Playground: (mp3)
2. The Inner Playground - defined
3. My Inner Inner City
4. My Own Private Hollywood
5. Part Two: Games for the Inner Player
6. Freeze Tag
7. Mother May I
8. Simon Says
9. Part Three: Building an Inner Playground
10. The Inner Seesaw
11. My Inner Swingset
12. Part Four: Introducing Serious and Silly
13. Serious and Silly (mp3)
14. Kick the Can

Imagine that there are only two players in your inner playground – one, who tends to be very rational, clear headed, sober, objective, serious, and all that is therein implied. Let’s call that one “Serious.” And another, who likes to be funny, to joke around, to do the unexpected, who is unpredictable and not really that reliable, who, in short, is for all intents and purposes, silly. That one, we’ll call, um, “Silly.”

To help you imagine these two players, you might want to find a mirror, or some other surface upon which you can, so to speak, reflect. Make the most serious, grown-up, purposeful face you can. In fact, you better make several. Keep on doing this until you find the one face that is clearly and inarguably serious. It’d help if you could take a picture. If not, imagine that you did. Next, do the same thing with your silly face – the silliest face you can make, the one face that you could never mistake for anything else but.

See also: The Importance of Being Silly from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi