The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.

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.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.

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."

To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.

We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.