Slow Play surprisingly has become more than a game for me, more than a way of exploration, it’s become a practice over the past month or so. Maybe we can choose our pace more often than we know? Slow play has illuminated the possibilities of choice in a powerful way.
An invitation lay at my bedside this morning. An invitation to play with movement – specifically it invites me to do everything slowly. I dubbed this game: Slow Play. But, what in the world does that mean? … Here is some of things I’ve been doing at least one or two beats slower than my usual:
To mask or not to mask? Is that the question? I gassed up my car the other day … wearing one or two masks, a face shield … I walked into this place and the first thing I saw was a person stocking shelves and their mask was hanging from one ear. Their face was totally exposed …
There’s nature, and then there’s NATURE! I haven’t been planning to evacuate because of a hurricane, flood, tornado, or a wild fire! The truth is that in light of … the final twelve days of the challenge offered up some new or re-learned understandings around communication, change and personal leadership:
I had a disappointment this past week … a little project that didn’t go off as I expected. I couldn’t have been more prepared, and yet there I stood – surprised in the actual moment … I knew enough to be present, to carry on, to do my best with what I had to work with. The thing is you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it. Change happens, play helps.
Can we listen to all the stories as if we were holding a bouquet of wild flowers tenderly in our hands? I believe truth can be found in all accounting. Here are five playful questions that might attune our ears – as a listener and a leader – in a more helpful way …
When leaders give themselves the time and space to walk the land – literally – we come to know the territory. If we follow our curiosity, wonder and playfulness – all kinds of opportunities present themselves.
Once upon a time I dug up snails, collected tadpoles, played in the dirt, climbed trees, and once had a ball searching though an abandoned house. When I became a woman, replete with car and license, I was handed the odd notion that if I walked outside, I’d better be careful …Then one day I began to question some of this …
One day, in March of 2016, I got a wild hair idea. That is, I had the odd notion that when I went out for my next walk, I ought to walk backwards. My next thought was that it would look a little odd, and it could be a risky thing to do. Heck, it might even be dangerous, and it did turn out to be dangerous, but more on that later.
I declared a while back that when we finally got our water heater in, I’d take a picture of myself with the water heater and then I started thinking what if I was a water heater any stress would be relieved by my overflow pipe and Temperature Relief Valve (TPR) . . .
