Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

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.

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

The universe is not particularly concerned with 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.

Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever-the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It's not abnormal, and it's not just for business. It's just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it's just life.

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.