Play, Not Games

Transcript

I’d like to talk to you about play, not games.

When we have a game there’s normally a winner and a loser. If we chose the incorrect game we might be losing a lot.

When I did the interview he talked about when he was younger and even today he had this certain impression or idea about what he valued. He valued the opinions of other people. That would mean he could never see himself as successful in his own eyes. He couldn’t see himself as attractive or important unless someone else acknowledged it or saw it.

This means even if he won, even if other people saw him as important or valuable he was still subject to their whims. Now that is a game I would not like to play. A very difficult game to win, a balancing act even if you get it right. You still might not really be a winner.

Many times when people are in trouble or they come to a crossroads in their lives and they don’t know where to turn I like to buy them a copy of this book, Oh the Places You Will Go by Dr. Suess.

Of course in the US and in Canada as well it is given to students when they graduate high school or university because they are at the crossroads in their lives. When I gave it to a few people in Australia they were amazed at the wisdom inside this book. At the perspective, the breadth of knowledge that it contains about life.

I always remember these particular verses “Oh the places you will go, there is fun to be done, points to be scored, there are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winningest winner of all. Fame, you will be famous as famous can be with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t because sometimes they won’t. Im afraid that sometimes we will play lonely games too games you can’t win because you play against you.”

I also recommend, many times I have recommended this movie The Hustler with Paul Newman in the role of Fast Eddie and the monologue, one of the finest in movie history where Fast Eddy is in the park with his lover Sarah and he is explaining to her what he really feels like.

He just had his thumbs broken by a couple of thugs and now he is unable to play pool. He says “why did they do it? I could have beat them. I could have beat them cold and they never would have known. I just had to show them how great the game can be when a guy knows.”

It seems I know this monologue better than I thought but he goes on and describes, now of course there is some ego mixed in and you can hear it in the monologue. That’s part of what makes this monologue and this film so brilliant is that fast Eddie is like this character is everybody in the movie.

You hear him when he describes picking up a pool cue and its like it becomes part of his body and he feels it just like the jockey on a horse. He knows when to let it out and by how much, he just knows.

Describing the sensation of Flow as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi but I think many of you know the book I am talking about. The book called Flow that’s what Fast Eddie is describing.

He says to Sarah “Am I a loser?”

And Sarah says “Your not a loser Eddie, most people never get to feel like that to be alive in the moment and feel that flow, to notice that aliveness in yourself and many moments of life.

We might feel that.

I remember the first time I took ayahuasca and one of the things mother ayahuasca said to me is “I like that you are rapping again, especially that you are free styling and improvising. Something so special about improvisation is we can get in the moment and things start to come out of us that we never knew could come out of us.

Brilliant things and strange things and if we focus truthful things. We speak such truth in those moments, that moment that we may astound ourselves even if we just are alone in our bedrooms. Just playing.

Just playing.