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."

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.

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.

Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say "What if I took the world at face value?" and then ask "What can I do with what is given?" it's an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.

Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."

There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.

Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.