Play is not an alternative to or a respite from work, but the process through which work is done – including the work of play in the sense of leisure and release. […] Thinking worldfully, it is better to think of play as a condition of the universe rather than a human activity – everything is “at play.”*
(Ian Bogost)

Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between then and the world.**
(Martin Buber)

If we’re charged with playing at something the insinuation is that we are not working, that we’re not committing.

Yet play is how we must describe what we enter into when we take our engagement with something or someone to a deeper, more invested place.

Play is how we must engage with the world if we are not to demean or disrespect it by attempting to take it into our knowing rather than allowing it to be what it is.

From I-in-me, I move to I-in-it, opening the possibility of I-in-us and even I-in-now when something new is generated:^

The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-now.^

*From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**From Martin Buber’s I and Thou;
^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.