All Work And No Play Makes Life...

REPOSTED FROM THE TRANS-SCEND BLOG 2015


I remember playing the game of Life when I was a kid. We would set up the board and grab cars and put our little peg in (mine was blue of course) and then start to play. It was fun zooming our car around and playing at going to college/getting a job, getting married, having kids and making/losing money. After we would pack it all up and go out and play until bed time and that was…life.

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So what happened? We grew up and thought wow that game was so fun I want to do it full time? Is this really what we wanted to do with our lives? Gee let’s get up every day, go to work some place where most of us are overworked and under-appreciated, not to mention underpaid. We struggle to make enough to keep up with all the things we think we are supposed to be buying, because you have to buy this stuff to win right? There has to be a way to win the game right, there was when we were kids… so what is it… oh yeah, work your ass off and retire, whoops no, retiring is out of the question for most now. So work until we win, err die… we win by dyeing? Or is that just how we escape the hell we have made out of life?

We made? Did I say we made? Yep, yep I did. Okay so some people believe that a God (I say “a” because there are many out there) made the earth and life basically but do we really think that something that powerful meant for us to do THIS with our lives? Basically we are chasing what… money… power… death? So this God made all of this just so we could… wish to die as fast as possible to get out of this horrible thing we call life. Okay, so we don’t go about our day thinking that way do we,  nope we think about what we have to do next.

Which is usually either… sleep, eat, shit, work, use some sort of mood altering substance to forget we are just waiting to sleep, eat, shit, work and so forth and so on. But WAIT we have weekends! Yay for us! We have two days to sit around the house (okay usually not sit, usually try and catch up on all the stuff we didn’t get done during the week cause we were so damn tired) and wish that we didn’t have to go back to the same cycle in two days!

Okay so God did that to us? Yeah, somehow I don’t think so. I mean, I’m not the most religious person but I think when we come right down to it most of the major religious books would probably say focusing our entire existence on money, power and death is probably not exactly what we are supposed to be doing with “life”. So what is?
Well… umm… its life right… we could try umm… LIVING It. Oh wow, wut? That is too confusing. I mean, we are living it right, we are here, working, eating…. That’s not living? Umm… nope, doesn’t seem that way to me. I mean seriously, except for the random mind altering stuff that occurs just basically because we trying desperately to forget the cycle and the random fun things that tend to pop up most of life just doesn’t seem like that much fun, it doesn’t seem full of LIFE as it were.  I mean come on, even as little kids we put the game AWAY and went out to PLAY, that is life.

So why is this how life is setup? Because we set it up like that. We are the ones that say life has to be like this, we are the ones that play into this particular “game” of life (horrible, horrible game by the way the makers should all be fired and… oh, that’s us, yeah moving on). Why did we ever come up this and why do we keep PLAYING it this way?
Please, please, please don’t think it HAS to be this way, that is why we are where we are today. We are all under this mass illusion that things have to remain the way they are… why? Who says? How many of us are barely hanging on in our lives? I’m not even talking spiritual type people, you don’t have to believe in a higher power, an awakening, enlightenment or any of that stuff to understand that there are more of us than there are them… who is them? Them that would want life to remain this way, the very few people that make any sort of profit off of it, the 1 percent as the Occupy movement would call it.

Actually, I don’t even want to put them in there, I want to say that every kid, whether we are winning the game or not has to eventually get tired of playing right? I mean we all got tired of playing the same game over and over eventually. I mean we’ve been doing this for CENTURIES, aren’t we tired yet? A few years of this after high school/college and I’m pretty sure we would all vote to play kick ball or something. But why doesn’t that ever cross our minds? Why don’t we ever even consider playing another game? Why are we so focused on this one?

I’m guessing because some where all that stuff about growing up, being responsible and life just isn’t fair finally sunk into our heads and took over. But why, why do we insist on doing something that is ultimately harmful to ourselves and others. How many people are abusing something in their lives whether it be drugs, alcohol, food, cigarettes, relationships, etc. because they can’t handle the stress of this “life”.

When we are unhappy with service somewhere do we all just keep going back to the same place? Nope, that’s why things go out of business or change employees/management. We make huge changes to life all the time. Look throughout history we have made some major changes like integration, women’s right to vote, men no longer wearing roman skirts. I mean come on those are huge things, okay maybe not the skirts but still new fashion trend. These things were changed by people, sometimes only a handful of very dedicated people sometimes it took armies, either way we changed the rules of the game (and no I’m not calling for a game of Risk here).

How do we change it? I don’t know the ins and outs but I do know it starts with all of us changing our minds about how we want to live our lives. Do we really want to chase things that matter little in the end.  First we have to understand that WE are the ones that really in charge of the RULES OF LIFE and that we can change the rules at any time, it just takes that knowledge and instead of heading back to work on Monday we could all be heading to RECESS!
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So let’s all start by sitting down and questioning just what we actually WANT out of life. If we could go back to being kids again, we made things because we wanted to not because we wanted money, we played with everyone no matter what they looked like, and we enjoyed just BEING. Back to when we were all five or six when everything was fun, new and exciting. Where we all got along and didn’t let anything influence that. Let’s try imagining that, grown children, life as… play. It might be hard to conceive of at first but we have all seen the alternative, do we really want this to be our LIFE?