THE GAME OF LIFE

Living life with intensity and depth, reaching out and welcoming every opportunity for transformation as it arrives, means you are able to ride the wave of continuous change. It requires you to trust your ability to overcome obstacles with an open mind, to seek new interpretations of life, to put everything at stake, including your own limits and fears. It is understanding that existence is an eternal game to be played and the knowledge of how to live through play. It is learning to live in the now, finding new situations to interpret and use as stimuli for growth both in practical and social terms.

Play is the best method for learning how to live. Is it not through imitation that our children learn how to become adults?

If we are always able to maintain a youthful spirit, facing all situations with fantasy and imagination, without being deterred by difficulties, even if we grow old physically, we can always enjoy our existence with 'Indifference' (to always act with the best of intentions and totally accept the outcome as the result of your choice).

But often, once we become adults, we take everything much too seriously and move from being masters of the game to being simple pawns. The fewer the possibilities we believe we have in life, the more limited is our ideal field of action. The real player is the one who knows how to be all the pieces at the same time, the chessboard, the rules, the play and even his adversary.

On the other hand, there are those who never take anything seriously, the people who do not even see the Great Game.

At the end of their life, they may realise that they never even made a single move.

Play allows the individual to experiment with all the different aspects of his/her personality and offers ground for expression, for total involvement, affirmation and change.

In a spiritual and social context play is the element that promotes and makes change more lively. It is the structural vaccine against adaptation, routine and habit.

The desire to find amusing paths with which to articulate even the more serious experiences is very important, along with the ability to find that pinch of divine humour that every situation, even the most difficult, carries with it.

Through play everything can be put under discussion, every limit can be overcome through thought, action and desire.

Joy and imagination are therefore fundamental tools. They make it possible to break the rigid patterns of the mind that often confines us and make us believe that situations are unchangeable.

The Game of Life is a collective experience of transformation of the individual and the world. Participation in the Game of Life creates movement in the interior life of its players and also promotes movement outwards as people begin to travel, often for long periods of time all over the world. The concept and the reality of the Game of Life is often shared with others along the way.

[ adapted from: http://damanhur.org/game/ ]