On the Gentle Mischief of Living Playfully
Figuring out your life's 'chess moves'
Ready for the Opening Move (in a Lifelong Game of Chess)
I left my hometown in my twenties. It wasn’t with a ‘watch me conquer the world’ smirk. There was nowhere in particular I needed to be, and I had no urge to prove to anyone that I ‘made it’. I wasn’t collecting achievements or chasing status, or even a better future. I was simply ready to live an adventure: curious, keen on expanding my horizons.
I was keen on making the opening move in what became my lifelong game of chess. I get intrigued by what life might feel like on the other side of a move, so I step there. I also don’t need the full game board revealed in advance. I follow invitations (some small and casual, others consequential), explore, and let the next move emerge from there.
An interesting noticing: Put me on a project with unclear purpose, fuzzy roles, and poorly designed systems, and I tell you, uncertainty and I are not gonna be friends. But, not knowing my next move rarely troubles me when I am choosing it. Agency helps offset my yearning for unknown and complex things to declare what they are.
My initial ‘chess moves’ took me to Germany, Italy, and New Jersey. As curious peeks into the world, they enabled me to get a feel for who I might be — anywhere, just on my own terms, please! It was intoxicating: joyful, expansive, light. Those summer moves involved jobs, yet they were still my true ‘enjoy freedom’, perfect-weather adventures.
Testing Hypotheses about the World
It has been a passion of mine to try to make meaning of the world (and people), with unexpected insights emerging all the time. My daughter Petra has a real talent for observing: As a child, she wouldn’t pester adults with endless ‘why’ questions. She’d run mental experiments, form hypotheses in her mind, and test them by watching.
By the time I moved to Prague for a year, I was ready to test hypotheses outside my head, in the ‘real world’. I wanted to experience life directly, the way the characters in the novels and poetry books lining our family shelves seemed to do. I wonder now, had those books been quietly teasing me all along: You know, you could try this yourself?
Being a student in Prague was intentional, it was ‘about something’. It also inspired the moves that followed. I nearly didn’t go: I had a job waiting, and it would have been sensible to take it. But, that move, at that point, would have dulled something in me that mattered. So I declined the job, in favour of expanding life’s horizons in Prague.
Another noticing: A non-move can be just as powerful as a move! Before Prague, a teaching job mischievously popped up. With no teaching credential, no textbooks, and a principal who wondered how he ended up with me, I invited my young students to play. And that year, they, and I, discovered how delightful playful learning can be!
The years in Vancouver offered a playground for appreciating life while testing what I love to pursue and what I don’t. I had an abundance of well-behaving days: purposeful, productive, fulfilling. I graduated, led truly impactful projects, became a dual citizen and a father. And then, over time, the life that once felt like a gift … grew routine.
Life’s Moves … Figureoutable and Overcomeable
Portugal brought a welcome new opening. By then, I had frameworks, language, years of reflecting on development, leadership, well-being. I was confident I knew how to play this game. Portugal smiled politely at my foolishness, making its moves: bureaucracy valuing patience over intelligence, and systems serving randomness beyond fun.
A professor remarked years ago that my crystallized intelligence was higher than my practical intelligence. Portugal tested that theory daily. On bad days, I was impatient and irritated, even a tad stubborn. (Kathy can confirm.) Systems that didn’t cooperate felt personally offensive. When did uneventfulness become my measure of a good life?
A noticing: I like simple, sensible, predictable systems that work. In Canada, they often are so, and I had come to expect them to be that way everywhere. It took time for a good day to become one where I am at peace with systems being merely figureoutable and challenges overcomeable. Maybe that’s the way the system here knows to plays chess.
Your Next Move
Over to you: What’s your next move? Once your relocation is done being mostly an adventure, are you open to experimenting with noticing? How will your life be when familiar scaffolding falls away? How are you with discomfort? What helps you on days that misbehave? Keep noticing, until you figure out the game, and come alive again.
If there’s a mischievous lesson in all of this, it might be that life will always serve us challenges, and we get to choose how we step into them. We can get mad, sad, humble, analytical, creative, or open to embracing what counts as a good day now. Sometimes, the days in our new place gently tease us into appreciating living a bit more playfully.
So — how has your day been so far?