Play Is Love ❤️ And A Meme

Loving play has an ethical intelligence.

It pays attention to timing. It respects vulnerability. It reads the room. It allows another person to decline without penalty. It protects the distinction between laughing with someone and converting that person into material.

The boundary is part of the affection.

A playful relationship develops signals that mean “continue,” “enough,” “try again,” or “today I need tenderness in a quieter form.” Social play works through this exchange of information. Participants adjust, repair, and return. The pleasure comes from freedom combined with confidence that the other person is still paying attention.

Research on adult playfulness has found associations with aspects of relationship satisfaction, closeness, attachment, and responses to relationship difficulty, although the field remains comparatively young and many findings are correlational. Playfulness also takes several forms, some of which partners experience differently. Responsiveness is more important than a permanent performance of lightheartedness.  

Trust also allows the invitation to move from premise to participation. If every playful gesture required another assurance that it would be understood, and every assurance required one more assurance, no one would ever begin. At some point, one person offers the empty cup and the other person drinks.

Love speaks fluently when it also listens.

Permission to Be Alive Together

One of the questions in my early Humor Index asked whether a person had permission to laugh out loud while growing up. Other questions asked whether the family sang, danced, played together, celebrated milestones, told stories, enjoyed mealtimes, lived with pets, and welcomed harmless jokes. The exercise was less concerned with measuring comic skill than with discovering whether play had been granted a place in the home.  

That permission stays with us.

Some adults enter a playful moment immediately. Others stand at its edge, waiting to learn whether they will be welcomed, embarrassed, corrected, or misunderstood. A loving invitation gives them room to approach at their own pace.

This may be one of play’s deepest gifts. It allows us to encounter another person beyond utility.

For a few minutes, nobody is producing, proving, managing, optimizing, performing, or solving. We are simply making something together: a game, a joke, a story, a ridiculous dance, a cardboard kingdom, a nickname, a memory.

In that shared construction, love says:

You are more than what you accomplish. Your imagination is welcome here. Your laughter changes the room. I enjoy being alive at the same time as you.

Play is a type of love language because it gives affection movement. It turns attention into participation, memory into ritual, intelligence into curiosity, safety into mischief, and care into a world that two people can briefly inhabit together.

Sometimes love says, “I will take care of you.”

Sometimes it says, “I understand.”

Sometimes it does not glisten at all. It simply texts you a meme. 

How Do You Play?

You can count jokes, games, puns, drawings, and practical jokes. Play itself behaves more like a mass noun. There can be play in a room even when no formal game is taking place. There can be play in a friendship without anyone telling a recognizable joke.

Play shares its character with its parts. A glance may contain it. A pause may contain it. The word “fine,” spoken with one very particular inflection, may contain enough play to sustain an entire conversation.

Love often has the same quality. We can count acts of affection, but love is rarely experienced as inventory. Its substance appears across its parts.

Shared vocabulary alone is insufficient. Two people can use the same words without sharing a world. Something more robust is called for: continuity of attention, recognition, responsiveness, and function. The playful act carries affection because of where it came from, what it does, and how it is received.

This also explains why two people can perform identical acts with entirely different meanings. A teasing remark can be tenderness in one relationship and contempt in another. A prank can communicate trust or disregard. A nickname can hold twenty years of affection or become a small instrument of humiliation.

The word is not the bond. The relation gives the word its sense.

The Way You Give Play May Differ From the Way You Receive It

Your strongest initiating signature may differ from your receptive one.

You may express affection through teasing while feeling most loved when someone enters your imaginative world. You may create rituals for other people while responding most deeply to a person who notices your smallest peculiarities. You may use intellectual play to invite closeness, then feel cared for when someone gently reframes the intensity of your own thinking.

Ask yourself what you naturally offer when you feel safe.

Do you remember details and turn them into affectionate callbacks? Recognition Play may be your strongest signature.

Do you invent voices, characters, explanations, and alternative worlds? You may be a World-Maker.

Do you create harmless disruptions and surprising arrangements? Benevolent Mischief may be your form.

Do you locate a different angle when reality has become heavy? You may be a Reframer.

Do you play with language, premises, ideas, and interpretive possibilities? The Idea Player is probably reading this sentence while constructing an objection to the classification.

Do you create traditions that preserve shared history? Ritual Play may be how you give affection continuity.

Most people combine several signatures. A Reframer may rely upon Recognition Play to find the precise joke another person needs. A World-Maker may create rituals through recurring characters and stories. An Idea Player may become a Benevolent Mischief-Maker whenever a whiteboard is left unsupervised.

The useful question is larger than, “Am I playful?”

Ask instead: How does my affection express itself when it is given room to play?

Still Gloomy? Try humor therapy.

 

Yesterday was one of those days. The details aren't as important as the real work that's required to dig deeper and not let the inadequacies of the world get you down. It's not easy though, as well all know. To look the other way, to lead with a smile when a part of you would really like to punch the thieves of happiness right in the gut. Not really, but the thought does bring a certain satisfaction to the mind. 

Regardless of what industry you find yourself, there are people who will cut corners, pretend they don't understand, act sneaky, and outright lie to your face, to their boss, and to a judge. These are the ones who make life difficult for the rest of us who are still holding ourselves up to higher standards. We are the ones who believe in walking the walk, not just talking the talk. We have the wild audiacity to put our faith in the justice system and are naive enough to think that telling the truth is all it takes to set the record straight and win a battle against a much larger, craftier opponent. That's not always the case. 

That's where a good sense of humor comes in. 

Your heart could feel like it's exploding, but you can always imagine it exploding and somehow find yourself laughing because humor can hijack you from a crappy situation and for a brief moment, you actually feel better. 

Funny thing is... you only need a moment on the other side of humor to get your laugh back. To get your thoughts straight. To think your way through a situation to the other side where you can right a wrong. To take a deep breath, adjust your ponytail or goatee, and say to yourself, they're not worth the energy. 

Some days, the heart doesn't break. Instead, it launches confetti without board approval. I think that's the techical term for it. 

You can be standing there, trying to stay calm, while your internal legal department is already drafting a 300-page motion telling the judge all the things the client did very, very wrong. Meanwhile your nervous system is holding an emergency meeting, and your last mature thought just left the building, leaving their phone behind. At least that version of you isn't firing off RFTs (rapid fire texts) trying to solve the crisis before you've even taken stock of where you land in the whole deal. 

Then humor waltzes in, wearing sunglasses, and says, "Okay, but how about we save our energy for better things? What if we shift gears into reverse, and get the heck out of dodge?" 

That's the pivot. 

That's all you need to move in the other direction. A simple little what if thought experiment can shift your perception from wanting to show those tricksters whose boss to going out with friends and letting yourself have a good laugh. 

This isn't forgiveness. It's not denial. It's not a case of pretending everything is fine while your soul is chewing on drywall. The villain doesn't become less villanious. The lie doesn't become less annoying. The shady little corner-cutter doesn't suddenly receive a certificate in ethics and personal growth. 

But you're not going to solve the situation, if all you see is red 💔

So you pivot again. And again. And again. And as many times as is necessary until you find that one inch of fresh air, which is just enough to remember that your heart is allowed to explode into tiny hearts and streamers instead of mind-consuming rage.  

This is humor therapy at its most practical: 

• My heart exploded, but thankfully it was the party-popper I needed.
• My peace of mind left the chat, but it said it might come back for snacks.
• I was going to spiral, but then I remembered I have things to do and a hair tie with more structural integrity than this situation. 
• I adjusted my ponytail like a woman preparing for battle.
• The goatee stroke is the masculine version of opening a philosophy seminar with deep concern.
• My amuse system is not missing. It's in witness protection. 
• The truth will set you free, but apparently it may also require exhibits, affidavits, and three people pretending they never stole the money. 
• My heart exploded, but in a festive way, which means growth. 

Whatever the world sends your way, just remember... you can get mad, you can feel frustrated, you can even plot your revenge, but those options fail to deliver you to the desired results you were hoping for in the first place. So you might as well let them go and get on with your humorous thoughts. 

Happy thoughts absolutely do travel fast, and they travel fastest when you're riding them yourself. 

The 5th Dimension

DEFINITION: 

5th dimensional thinking is the act of projecting trained heuristic abilities onto the quantum lattice work that holds the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force) and then superimposing your attention in the direction or manifestation of your choice. 

Understanding that all things are possible expands the realm of possibilities to a blank canvas. As our imagination fills in that canvas, we align with the particles that make up our vision, and by doing so, integrate the essence of those subatomic particles within, which when metaphorically watered, like a plant, grow from the seed or kernel of an idea into a plant that bears fruit. 

A Game of Pretend

The entire world order is built on inside jokes, those Shared Sensory-Verbal Periods where awareness resides in a shared sensory experience, the task is communication and the end result is 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 blocks of which are built upon imaginary thought coupled with a desire to move things around. We might be the type of person who prefers to put pieces back into a place we have come to believe they fit or we might be the type of person who decides to try their hand at picking pieces up and seeing what it's like to walk around being a puzzle. 

Admittedly, this trial-and-error type of experience is best when shared.

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 because of our miraculous efforts manifest into a calm, smooth, endlessly delightful, dizzingly spinning ride... 

...or into an Explosive New Shinning Star ~ 

Or...

...into whatever you like

The experience of pretend resides in the person having it. You might be a delightfully curious person, feeling yourself compelled to follow the White Rabbit ... where ever he may hop. 

Or...

And when you're not out following the White Rabbit on an adventure, you're off reading fairy tales and gathering points for your next adventure ... 

Or... 

Perhaps you're just soaking in all the things you saw on your last adventure... assimilating them and actively adding elements to heighten what you discover until those discoveries become the starting point of a new adventure or brilliant idea. 

Eventually, or suddenly and quite magically, Pretend brings us before the Queen in recognition of our own, unique contribution to the world ~ 

We become part of the ideal we seek when we manifest it in ourselves. 

Question?

How long did you watch the spinning tea cups until you found the loophole? What did you notice first?

For me, the imagine makes me giggle. The dizzying sensation takes be back to childhood when my friends and I would play outside, spinning ourselves until we fell down on the grass laughing and giggling.

Of course, like any good video game, we have multiple viewing options. We can choose to view it critically until the anomaly pops out.

Or...

We can view things creatively until a magic tea cup appears

...offering to grant us three wishes.

Whether we want to be soothed by life or excited by it, however we choose to experience our world, we are doing it so through the veil of pretense. Pretense lies in that which brings us hope, the enduring belief in the attainability of our wishes... 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 operate from this stage ~ it is our center by which we learn to be and to act. We are on stage, we are 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. We are also the child galloping through the production, ever mindful that we are the one's creating the play.

The Answer You're Looking For

When you go out into the world you know you're going to see something clever, funny and inventive. What you don't expect, however, is to see a remarkably intelligent treatment of the most complicated and confusing philosophical issues of them all: the self. 

Are you still the person you were yesterday, last year or twenty years ago? What about fifteen minutes ago? How do you plan for a future you you don't yet know? Which one is the real you? Does the self remain constant over time and place, or is it something fragmented or fluid? Can you claim yourself as property? A number of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and neurologists have the answers to this question. But how do you go about answering it? Or, have you even bothered? 

Maybe you're not into reincarnated Lamas. Maybe you spend more time thinking about what you've got to do today, or how you're going to spend your weekend. Maybe you just spend your time in pompous pontification, before arriving to the point. Maybe then things make sense. Thereon is a beautiful enlightening thought. But I have to be honest up to this point here I was ready to throw the whole post away or use it as a sleep aid. 

What do your emojis say about you?

 😁Bright eyed & Cheerful

Bright-eyed & cheerful people are the nicest complex people you'll ever meet. They have already ridden the rollercoaster of life and they're going for another ride. 

😂Goodnatured People Who Are Willing to Laugh at Your Joke & in so doing: LAUGH 

Goodnatured people are humorous. They like to laugh, especially with others. When they come upon something funny, they laugh instantly. The random juxtaposition of concepts makes them laugh. Instant laughter is easier to summon when people wear disposable ego filters. The beauty of a manufacturing lite filters or "Absolute Filters" (as we call them) is the welcoming of all novel airborne filters and the ability to direct them towards a special shelf where they are later curated and displayed as objets d'arte. These objects are housed in archives. People delight in the idea of building archives. The delight produces a smile. People who dress themselves in smiles are known to laugh more often and more easily, and in general, end up having a pretty good time of it. 

😅You are Excitable!

You readily admit that you were intensely engaged in a given experience and that your heart is still pounding, in a relaxed, playful, giddy way. You're like, Whew! This type of individual is also game to jump in the pool at the annual Halloween Party. 

😉You're no Dummy

You don't wink. You are a smart, high-achieving go-getter! You're Reiki teacher taught you to embrace the holistic mind-body-emotion-intellect-action-spiritual approach to unleashing your power as you summon the creativity of the Gods.

😌You Genuinely Care About People 

When you ask someone how they're doing, you actually stick around to hear the answer. 

😏You are that person that will never ever tell ... 

You are the friend that shows up. You even stick around and help clean up after the party. 

😘You Love Your Friends 

You love your friends. You're the friend that still gives dorky high-fives. You post funny memes. You care about people and try not to notice your own limitations in the presence of their awesomeness! You are comfortable expressing joy and pleasure. 

And then, 

😎there's always that 1% ...