Different to games in time.

The finite player aims to complete things in time.  The infinite player is more aware of what is yet to be done, how incomplete things are.

Each of us has a finite player and an infinite player within us.  We get to choose how we will live with time.

Next month I will be fifty-five years old.  The finite player in me bemoans how the best years have gone, how my energy is waning (tell my legs it ain’t so), and, whilst I have my dreams, there’s not enough time in which to pursue these.  I have elected to believe that it is time which gives me freedom to live a fully Human life of creativity, generosity, and enjoyment.

The infinite player in me knows that age is not the issue, rather my “purpose, passion, and pleasure” are the most important life-dynamics, and most hindrances can be overcome with courage, generosity, and wisdom.  My dreams increase.  I have elected to believe that it is freedom which affords me time.

This freedom is found in the energy we find at the centre of our lives, in knowing who we are and what we have and how we hardly know yet what we can do with these; there is also freedom to be found in knowing we are far from perfect, we are not complete, and we have farther to go.  I’m cool with this, I hope you are too.  I’ve never been happier and perhaps this is ‘the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Master Eckhart called “eternal birth”‘*

You may enjoy this story I came upon this morning:
An Elder had finished preparing his work of baskets with handles for market when he heard his neighbour saying, “What shall I do?  The market is about to begin and I have nothing with which to makes handles for my baskets.”  The Elder removed the handles from his own baskets and gave them to his neighbour, saying, “Here, I don’t need these, take them and put them on your own baskets.”

Content with incompleteness, I think he chose to be an infinite player playing games with time.

(*If you’re younger than me and get this, you’re laughing.)