The Inside Joke

The entire world order is built on inside jokes (okay, slight exaggeration, but I'm making a point here), those moments where awareness resides in a shared sensory experience; the task is communication, but the end result is usually enjoyment. 

From our first encounter with an individual (or an idea) to each subsequent encounter thereafter comes a number of "first times" ... the first time we think of something, the first time we feel something specific regarding a specific thought, and so forth. 

This endless field of perceptions make up the beginning of a game we have been playing since childhood: 

Pretend

Playing Pretend propels us toward vertical independence, the fundamental building block from which all imaginative thought grows. 

We might be the type of person who prefers to put pieces back into the places where we believe they fit... or we might be the type of person who decides to hop over the fence, try their hand at picking some pieces up, all the while enjoying the heck out of the experience that comes with discovering all new places where the pieces might also fit!

Ideas, thoughts, feelings, experiences, perceptions, visions, epiphanies, explosive sensations: the arsenal of accessories from which we choose to explore our world. 

Life is like a game of sorts... following mazes, accumulating points, treasures, and experience; we either move forward, sail backward, or steady our ships so that the world's crashing waves, roaring calms, and tsunami-like experiences might manifest into a calm, smooth, endlessly delightful, marvelously delicious spinning ride... 

...Or 

into an Explosive New Shinning Star ~ 

Or...

...into whatever you like

The experience of pretend is the inside joke that resides in the person having it. 

You might be a delightfully curious person, feeling yourself compelled to follow the White Rabbit... 

Or...

You might be a Storyteller, 

busy creating or building fairy tales for others ...

Or... 

Perhaps you're just accumulating adventures... endlessly and creatively assimilating them all while actively adding new elements to heighten each subsequent discovery until some of those discoveries explode into the starting points of new adventures or brilliant ideas you bring to life.

Eventually, or in some cases, suddenly and quite magically, Pretend brings us right before the Queen Mother herself... 

She is also on a magical ride. Imagine the world from her viewpoint. We are one of the many characters that delight her, too! We are all Cocreators of the world we seek...

Are you dizzy yet?

What did you think about the spinning tea cups? What was your first, second, third, thought? Are you looking at it now? If you're reading this sentence you're probably thinking to yourself that you wish you were looking at the picture instead of reading this endlessly looping sentence whereby you keep reading because the sentence keeps going on and on until you realize that I am playing with you, messing with your head, purposely writing just to see if you'll keep reading, kind of like the picture, right?

Fun, huh?

For me, the spinning tea cups make me giggle before my mind has a chance to dart off in every conceivable direction I have time to entertain. The dizzying sensations physically take me back to childhood when my friends and I would play outside, spinning ourselves silly until we fell down on the grass laughing and giggling for hours on end.

This is that space where tea cups magically came to life... 

Whether we want to be soothed by life or have fun with it, however we choose to experience our world, we are doing it through the veil of pretense. Pretense is that which brings us hope and the enduring belief in the attainability of our wishes. Herein lies the inside joke. 

Admitting that most of what we do is playing pretend brings with it confidence, enthusiasm, positive thinking, and excitement about life's possibilities. It is the essential essence needed to thrive and move forward in the world and within ourselves. 

We mostly operate from this pretend stage ~ it is our center by which we learn how to be and how to act. We are on always on stage. We are also in the audience. We are the characters, the script writer, the director, the financier, the costume designer, the marketer, the negotiator, and all the other -ers one could imagine surrounding each stage of life. 

If we're lucky, we never forget that LIFE is our play time. We are all the proverbial child galloping through our own productions of life. Our giant horse causes a sensation! Chairs get knocked over! 

CRASH! BOOM! BANG! 

Things get moved about... 

SWOOSH! 

Our horse's foot gets tangled in ropes, pulling down entire sets with one sweeping motion! We raise all sorts of havoc and attention and yet, by golly, 

It is our play!

If we don't like how it unfolds, we can try something 

NEW!

We can apologize to the audience; to our parents, teachers, children, colleagues, friends, loved ones; to our dentist, our baker, to the guy at the deli, and to our mailman for the disruption, which reminds them (and us) that we are the director of our lives, responsible for the outcomes; the comings and goings of all the central characters, the theme, all the little foreshadowing events...

EVERYTHING! 

Disruptions are simple reminders that we are writing our own script. Like the audience, we don't know exactly what all of our efforts will look until they're up on stage, but our eyes are wide open when the curtain comes up. 

After all, we're acting in this play, toO!