We construct our lives round constructions of certainty — homes to stay in, marriages to like in, ideologies to assume in — and but some primal a part of us is aware of that none abides, is aware of that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.

Surprise — that edge state on the rim of understanding, the place the thoughts touches thriller — is our greatest technique of loving the world extra deeply. It asks of us the braveness of uncertainty as a result of it’s a type of deep play and play, not like video games, is inherently open-ended, with out objective or finish purpose, ruled not by the desire to win some extent however by the willingness to give up to a locus of expertise and be remodeled by it.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer celebrates this lens-widening, life-deepening property of surprise in her incantation of a poem “Intention”:

INTENTION
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

To surprise. To surprise with no plan
for the place it’d lead. No technique
for arrival. No end line. No pot
of gold. No good rating. No striving for.
To surprise. To surprise the way in which a small little one
would possibly surprise when seeing a roly poly for the primary time —
oh, take a look at all these legs. Take a look at how
it curls! Look the way it strikes once more. Really feel
how gentle it’s within the palm. Really feel how
it tickles because it strikes. Think about
an consciousness that new assembly a life type that outdated.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?
To surprise not simply with my thoughts
however with my stomach. To let each neuron
spark. To note the place there’s a channel
and picture the good wing of life
is scraping it clear so the stream would possibly circulate
in new methods. To surprise past the sting
of the identified, and in that spaciousness, play.

Couple with Mario Benedetti’s enlivening poem “A Protection of Pleasure,” then revisit Johan Huizinga’s traditional century-old meditation on how play turned the fulcrum of civilization and Henry James on the right way to cease ready and begin residing.