NOEMAYA

Change doesn’t always have to be a heavy process, at least not as heavy as our minds make it. It can be treated more lightly, almost like a game. A playful attitude toward change is more effective than anything else, simply because play doesn’t raise the suspicion of the status quo whereas a protest does!

But what do we need to start this fun game of Change: the main weapon you need for it is awareness. When you feel an old, familiar pull, one that usually compels you to act in a predictable way as a result of repetition or conditioning—pause. Notice it. And this time, instead of going along with it, try something different, just for the fun of it and out of a childlike curiosity, just to find out what happens! Don’t we all do these kinds of things in games, spontaneous acts which are supreme expressions of our fundamental freedom!

It’s like driving home from work on a familiar highway. You always take the same exit, and it’s become automatic so that you barely notice the process anymore. But today, take a different exit. You won’t get lost; you know there are many paths home. Just try something different today. Again, don’t even tell yourself that you are changing anything; do it with spontaneity only to see what happens next, as if you are just fucking around to find out. This will shift something in you, gives you existential evidence that things can be different, that it is possible to turn left even when your whole system tells you to turn right.

This play is even more fun and effective on days that we don’t feel like doing some of our tasks, especially the smaller tasks, such as making your bed or putting dishes in the dishwasher right after using them, or checking a small task from your calendar. Remember: the easiest things to do are easiest not to do.

When you plow through your calendar and check everything you planned regardless of how you feel that day, your body collects evidence that there’s no intrinsic association between how you feel and what you do, between stimulus and response; you learn to live between the two instead of outside and around them. Isn’t that a fun game to play with any area of our lives that need work!

And all work always comes down to squeezing yourself in between the gap between stimulus and response, to find your home there and making the gap grow and never abandoning it again. That’s the real growth, when we see that we determine ourselves and our destiny not by controlling and manipulating the stimuli but by choosing how we respond to them, a choice that cannot be made unless we live in that pause between what happens and what we do with it, between what is and what we make of it.

That’s what I took away from the film Life is Beautiful: no matter how hostile or difficult things seem, you can encourage yourself, or your inner child, to transform simply by adopting an attitude of play. Treat life like a game. Don’t weigh it down with stories of too-seriousness. Things happen anyways, but we will only make them worst by being negative about them or circulating the negativity. If anything can be effective in changing things for the better, it will be a playful attitude, for it’s only then that we make our best decisions, free of fear and worry.

It’s the stories we tell ourselves that shape our experience. When you paint your situation in harsh, threatening tones, the body reacts with survival instincts: preserve, defend, resist. Change becomes difficult. But if you give it the frame of play, a game, you open the door to curiosity and exploration.

So here’s a thought experiment: can you pretend for just one day, or even just an hour, that you’re inside the most immersive video game ever made? Technology so advanced you can feel every detail, every sensation. What would you do differently? How would that change your attitude? Wouldn’t you be more curious about what your avatar is capable of? Wouldn’t you try different things, different responses to the same situations, just to find out what else is there in the world, in you!

We all long for that kind of immersive experience—people even pay for simulations of it. But doesn’t that desire come from the parts of ourselves we suppress in real life? Isn’t it the shadow wanting a safe space to play out what it can’t elsewhere?

The truth is: we are already in it. This life is that panoramic, 3D, fully immersive experience, and you are suffering more in your imagination than in the reality-play that this life is.

So what if you treated today as the game? Just for one day, live as though it’s the game. What would you do differently?