It’s going to take some time.

Or, to put it another way …

You and your art are going to be around awhile.

We’re playing an infinite game, which is more concerned with how you’ll play the game than how you did before; rather than a finite game in which only some – those often perceived to be the best – get to play.  It strikes me that this is the genius of the infinite game.  You to bring everything you are, not just the best bits; you can bring the pain and the failures and figure out how to deal with them as the game plays out.  This means,of course, you pick yourself and you can begin now.

The rules of the infinite game, unlike those of the finite game, change in play, ensuring no one is rejected or ejected and the game doesn’t end.**

Who knows who you’ll become and what you’ll achieve if you just keep playing?

This game is real.  Daniel Kahneman tells me, ‘cognitive scientists have emphasised in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain.’  Kahneman also tells me an activated idea doesn’t evoke just one idea. but many – most of which will never rise into my consciousness, so masses of associative thinking happening in my unconsciousness.

All of this makes me wonder whether playing infinite games not only making it possible to evoke an idea, not only proffers ways for ideas to be embodied, but sets in motion loads of unconscious thinking which, if we  remain in the game, will burst out “from nowhere” further down the trail?

I’m just crashing together ideas from different places at the moment, but it seems to me, if we only allow ourselves to play finite games, little of this will have value.

Not only are you more ready than you know, not only does an infinite game provide the best place for dealing with your junk as well as with your art, but we’re also rooting for one another to keep playing the game.

(*The title of a Seth Godin blog playing on Chris Anderson’s term “the long tail” for how everything produced is accessible to purchase because of the internet.)
(**Think of the people, businesses, and parties which have self-destructed because they couldn’t change the rules of play.)