Playing Life
all the amazing adventures we never take
Dear friends,
When I was about 11, my mum woke me up one morning with a plan. We were going to catch a train up the center of the Australian continent, then sail to Indonesia and spend a few months island hopping.
Nothing was going to stop us: not the fact that we didn’t have the money, not the fact that we didn’t have the time, or that we had no reasonable expectation of ever doing it. Didn’t matter. We planned. We researched. I mean, we cut photos out of travel agency brochures.
It was time well spent.
So yesterday, when I accidentally squandered my dedicated “Creativity Time” on preschool logistics for Lila, I didn’t sweat it too hard. Because it didn’t feel like logistics. Helping Lila get ready to embark on her life at forest school this fall has the same exact quality for me as imagining an intrepid journey across desert and sea.
I love imagining how my days will look in some imaginary future time. When will I wake up? What will I eat? How will I feel? Will I affect a French accent? Will I have an interesting scar?
It’s as though by projecting myself forward into events that may never happen I can live multiples lifetimes at once. I’m greedy that way.
You know those studies that show that your brain can’t tell the difference between you lifting a weight and imagining lifting a weight? (If this is wrong, don’t @ me, the last thing I need right now is a new workout routine.)
This research suggests that there are experiences we have, and experiences we only imagine having, but that there’s maybe no big qualitative difference between them. To me, both kinds of experience are scarily alike. When I look back at them, sometimes I remember my imagined inventures as being way richer and more life-changing than the disappointing, bedbug-strewn adventurous realities.
Life lesson: imaginary adventures tend not to contain bedbugs. If yours do, seek help.
At any rate, because I’m a massive square (read: Virgo), my dreaming is unfashionably dominated by logistics. Because it’s fun for me, okay? I can squeeze three lifetimes of school dropoff playlist design and lunchbox fruit combinations into one late summer afternoon.
Mum and I never caught the Ghan to Darwin or sailed between islands on an archipelago when I was a pre-teen. But that adventure was one of the greatest of my life.
Community Voices
CHILLS, Monica! 🙌
Recommendation: We Can Do Hard Things
In a scare-citing personal moment, Marty and I went on Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach’s incredible podcast to talk about our unconventional relationship. It was a lot of fun to speak about out love inventure with these gorgeous women.
Meme Corner
I feel like this speaks so beautifully to the importance and the power of stories.
Your experience of dreaming that trip - although you never actually 'took' that specific trip, from what I know about your adult life, you HAVE been an incredibly adventurous soul, taking many 'real' trips - and I can't help but wonder if all that time imagining in your childhood played a role in you being able to do that in your life. We're always told to visualize those things we wish to work towards in our lives - and imagining, story telling, making believe - that's the most potent way of going about this task. It also speaks to the idea that you've been honing your skill of 'storyteller' for as long as you can remember - these early childhood experiences being a kind of foundation for all that you've become. You using your creative time for Lily - literally creating her future through your plans, which again is a form of story telling - it's all one big creative act, this being alive!
I also think your living all these different lives through your stories - THAT is the other HUGE important piece of what stories bring to the world.
Stories connect us. They help us develop empathy and awareness of the experiences of others that we wouldn't have had access to otherwise. They help us bridge these gaps we have between one - creating that sense of 'ah, we're not all that different after all that this world NEEDS so deeply right now.
Stories, the creative act and the consumption, are an integral part of humanity. They always have been, and I think as we try to create a new world that's filled with more empathy, stories are going to be more important than ever before.
I also love what you talk about in terms of stories being
Love the podcast! I’m currently recovering from a chronic illness and taking the inventure and risk to see how beautiful my life can now be on the other side.
(Also I felt so moved hearing you and Martha on we can do hard things.) bring on the fire hose of love!