The Games We Play: Pools, Conferences, and Hallway Blessings

- Tweet0
- 0
- Pin It 0
- 0
- Subscribe to RSS
Subscribe

Subject: The Games We Play: Pools, Conferences, and Hallway Blessings

Hi Friend,

In my last email (and thank you to those of you who reached out and said that it touched you), I mentioned that this past week, we went to Niagara, NY, right next to Niagara Falls, where I attended the conference of the Spiritual Directors International and Krissy spent some time with her family/community. As a result, on the evening of the end of the conference, we spent some time with Krissy’s just-turned-11-year-old grandchild, Monty’s child, whom I sometimes refer to as Kiddo.

Like most kids - and certainly like me when I was a kid - Kiddo engages with life as a series of games. As we were staying in a hotel, we played the kinds of games that hotels make available, which included tossing various things (hats, balloons, etc.) around the hotel room, running down long hallways and making up stories about who is on the other side of the long line of doors, playing in the arcade room (where Kiddo beat me on pretty much every game, though I almost won at bubble hockey), coloring iguanas with (tiny) crayons made available by the nice waitresses at the restaurant, and, our favorite, swimming pool games.

The problem with adults is that (obviously) they either a) forget that life is a series of games or b) are playing very boring games that don't necessarily have much space for kids, or for fun in general. Or for collectively changing the rules as you go along.

We humans collectively create the rules in the games we play, which include all sorts of serious things, from governance to healing modalities to religious practices to village gossip - aka drama (played out at all levels of society). The implications of adult games are super serious: life and death, social status, where you live and don't live, etc.

Perhaps because the implications are so often no laughing matter, we adults often forget that we made up the games of 'how to live together in a society.' I don't mean that I made them up, or that you did, but that a (usually relatively small) group of people did, and that we do have some level of agency into what role we might play. And sometimes we can shift how the game is played. (Thus, for example, the play of Marriage these days is no longer just between male and female gendered people; many different genders can and do marry one another.) The diversity of culture, law, and social custom across time and space is evidence of the many, many different ways humans choose to play together.

I could, here, go deep into game theory or social play or the many ways in which thinking about/working towards social change is also thinking/philosophizing/enacting how to change the rules and the purpose of the game that we collectively play. Or how one person's idea of fun (ie, the current U.S. President) is not necessarily another person's idea of fun. Or how very, very ugly and awful can be the games that adults enact.

But I'll stick to something simpler (this is a missive, not a long article, after all): moments at this most recent conference for people who are, like myself, Spiritual Directors, wherein we participants, not the conference leaders, shifted the games we were playing together at a small, but for us significant, scale. Hopefully in this you will find something of value/inspiration/amusement.

Conferences have become a relatively common forms of adult play. They seem to have developed a relatively standard set of actions: big name speakers in that specific space who inspire audiences sitting on somewhat uncomfortable chairs in some kind of a large room, often without windows, perhaps with lots of circular tables for people to write in a notebook often given out in the cloth bag with lots of marketing paraphernalia in it and specially made pens. Hopefully, the pens are of good quality, but that is not certain.

Participants are often drawn by the big name speakers, yet from what I've heard across sectors and topics, it seems that for most people, the most valuable part of most conferences are the somewhat-chance (erm, synchronous) conversations in the hallway or around the coffee-and-cookie station during the breaks. In these in-between, almost liminal spaces new colleagues, relationships, ah-hah moments, or potential clients can spark and begin to form.

I have to admit: I once found conferences to be a rather boring form of adult play and a questionable use of my time. If the most valuable part was the (cumulative) 55 minutes between sessions, and I could listen to most of the speakers on YouTube while taking a walk and not have to sit in a big room and re-enact some kind of college-lecture-course, what's the point? I didn't particularly like lecture- style of learning when I was 20, and I don't particularly like it now. Though I know that some people love it… and I admit that I very much enjoy the role of being a speaker!

Even so, conferences still, on occasion, appeal to me. I too am often in my own small world, and want to see how my world intersects with other people's related but different worlds.

Surely, surely, some kind of good play can occur there.

But I find I often need to enact it: I can't just play along with the 'sit in the back and hide out on your phone' game that is so common at big gatherings (I mean, I get it, I have social anxiety too).

So here's a few moments of what I think of as real good play that emerged for me on the final day of this particular 3-day gathering (which was very much the format I described above... as I expected it would be.)

1) The moment when a bunch of us created an art-table in the back of the room. Literally a play table... So that we could play the way we want to play.

First - spiritual directors like me are often pretty artsy-crafty-musical folks. I'd like to say it goes with being a mystic. The big stage had a fair amount of music, and so did the hallways, with people sharing guitars and sing-along kinda songs. Arts and Practice was one of the daily themes/breakout rooms. Even so, in the Big Room, there weren't any available art supplies (these were in another room designated for doing art). This is really normal… but it defeats the truth. So a few of us self-organized and created our own art-station in the back (and note this very cool traveling watercolor set that one of the participants showed me! Perfect for all sorts of travel!) Those of us at the table quickly bonded, and shared all sorts of notes, resources, and ideas ... that were partly a result of seeing one another's artwork. It did what art always does: it relegated our own nervous systems, helped us engage with the material in our own way, and built bonds between us.

2) Leaving the room when the speaker wasn't resonating... and creating what works/plays well for us.

Inevitably, participants don't resonate with all the speakers... in this case, the speaker was, in my opinion, pretty terrible. Fortunately, I was at the art table, and I noticed that one of my new-found friends/colleagues wasn't even art-ing, she was on her phone (ie, really bored). I also knew her well enough to know that both of us were interested in group-practices for spiritual direction - for ourselves and for people who come to us - ... and that there was a book out on the book-table that said it was about that very topic.

So I tapped her shoulder… and we ditched the big room. I borrowed the book from the table and the two of us found some chairs in the hallway outside and looked at the book together. OK.... this is what the book is suggesting.... does that make sense? Can you imagine doing that in your practice? No? Yes? Why not? I think this part would be useful here.... before long, other people were passing by us (we were not the only ones bored by the speaker) and wandered our way (because we were obviously having a fun and interesting time). It "happened" that several of them were also interested in group spiritual direction practices, and they told us their stories. By the time the main speaker inside had finished, we had a whole host of new ideas, had exchanged contact information, and had decided to meet up on zoom and start experimenting with some different practices in this area. We all knew that our people (people like you!) need both individual engagement and circle/group engagement, as do we. Boom. Done. Easy peasy. Just press play.

3) Hearing the opening for the movement of Spirit that keeps happening... and then moving it into being.

One of the speakers we enjoyed was Sara Critchfield from the Fetzer Institute, one of the rare foundations that funds religious and spiritual initiatives for 'a loving world'. I've long appreciated many aspects of their funding approach. Herself a spiritual director, Sara talked about the importance of spiritual directors in reSourcing people who are engaged in social change: that through our work with leaders, the leaders can approach their work in the world from a place of love, not just fear.

Unsurprisingly, speaking to a crowd of spiritual directors like myself, this was much appreciated. That’s what we all want our practice to be doing: helping people reSource themselves from love, not fear.

She spoke of spiritual entrepreneurship and of the importance of people (like myself) bringing spiritual reflection processes into new spaces. I, of course, agreed.

After her talk, the two people who stood up first to ask her questions identified themselves as spiritual entrepreneurs. One of them shared how she was about to start a new interspiritual initiative in her local town in Wisconsin. When? Next week. She asked for advice.

Listening to the woman asking the question, I heard someone who was about to embark on a new venture... and that there was a very specific form of support that those of us in the audience could offer her right then and there.

I watched for the moment to arise; to open up. It did: in the hallway near the coffee station. Of course.

I so appreciate this new initiative you are starting, I told her. I am wondering if I can offer you a blessing for it.

She looked at me with wide eyes. Oh, yes, she said. I could almost see that child part of her emerge: yes, let's play that particular game together. Please.

I'm going to gather some others, I told her: let's go outside

It was a short break (they usually are), and so I knew I didn't have that much time. So I gathered people (aka strangers) - literally tapping them on the shoulder and asking them if they wanted to join us as we moved towards the door. Will you join me in offering this woman a blessing as she starts her new initiative?

Unsurprisingly, they all said yes. Spiritual directors love blessings.

I gathered us outside. There were some (to my mind random) stone slabs (perhaps for sitting? unclear!) outside the convention center. I had her stand on one of them, and all of us stood around her on the ground. And then I lifted up my hands, and sang a loud wordless song to invoke and evoke and claim our circle in the middle of the concrete and the perfectly-planted trees to be sacred; to claim the wild energies that are always around us, even in front of big buildings. I made sure we were outside so that I could sing loudly without disturbing others.

And then we brought our circle closer around her, joining her on the slightly elevated stone, with her in the center of our circle, and each person offered her a blessing. My blessings were interlaced with prayers for protection: I know that the kind of work she is aiming to do is far more dangerous these days than it used to be.

Quickly, she was trembling.

The play was real.

Which is, of course, the magic of ritual.

Even those rituals that are done quickly, outside of a conference building, with no real prep. It's real and powerful, and we could all feel the hovering of the spirit, like wings, surrounding us and above us. All of us were quaking.

Had I followed the 'normal rules' of a conference, or of most professional-social spaces, I might have just told her that I offered her many blessings on her journey, and she would have smiled and maybe given me a hug.

But I don't think that's the real point of any of these gatherings. that's just the boring-ness that they too frequently devolve into: to talk about blessings more than to enact them.

We are here for this: for the play that brings us alive. For the realness of it all.

Any of the speakers would have said that.

Upon re-entering the building, the woman was on the edge of tears. The moment was so big for her. I made sure she had water and took a few deep breaths before re-entering the big room with purple lights and no windows. I think we all shone when we came in - bright and gleeful and running late, like kids after a really good recess.

After all, this is part of why we came to such a gathering: to be with others with whom we could play.

Perhaps we are all here for this: to enact with one another that play which is worth playing.

Wherever you are gathering with strangers or well-known kin or the many in between, I hope you find ways to play the games that you want to play with them. In small ways that can also be big ways. To shift spaces and sing loudly and even splash one another (assuming consent) in a public pool, keeping an eye on how your splashing impacts others - that's also part of adult play at its finest! In small ways that can also be big ways. Which is what so many gatherings are trying to enable - and what is all too easy to miss out on.

Subscribe

Subject: The Games We Play: Pools, Conferences, and Hallway Blessings