You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that's the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time.

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."

You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.

We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.