Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.

There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.

Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.

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

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.

If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.