FootprintsintheWind.com

Filling conversations.

:- Doug.

Enjoyment of conversation is art and experience.

It also takes abandon—as when, as a young child, you push out into space. . .and your fears. . .on that giant slide with the big bump in its slope: once you have conquered that. . . .

:- Doug.

How do we cease preparing and enter the conversation now?

:- Doug.

What does conversation generate that does not generate conversation?

:- Doug.

The game designer is working to have his players seek as many of human needs as they will, using, for instance, Maslow’s hierarchy. A person in conversation has to be aware of how all of these and the innumerable others play together in the person’s opposite, and in the person, and in the between of them, and of the surround of them, at once. For starters.

But is it simply passively finding things? Is it placing things there? Is it in fact inventing things (memory or creating or both)? Or the something else larger?

:- Doug.

Call me earthling.

:- Doug.

The other thing I will remember some other time.

:- Doug.

First the planet produces people
Then some people become persons
Earth peoples to person!

:- Doug.

We invite and so do well by these nearby representatives of humanity. When invited we choose to accept or not, or something between. Live invitingly. Live acceptingly. Talk. Seek out new inviting ways. Mention your books being written or other deepening projects; ask about theirs; be curious. Invite curiously.

:- Doug.

Game designers want to get inside the players’ minds. So too you and your counterpart when you are conversing; but held up to a game, it is bigger, more nuanced, and therefore less knowable. An action even less knowable is what your other has found inside your mind. And more: what they suspect you know of them that they know of you, back through all the mirrors in the barbershop.

:- Doug.

Play a game; tell a story about your play for another to hear or read. Your game became a story, your story a conversation, your conversation your life. Together. When you hear such a story and give compliments or thank the teller, you grow a person, you grow your world.

:- Doug.

Conversation helps us build a more complete world model, to integrate ourselves more into the world from which we were brought forth.

:- Doug.

Everywhere you go, you encounter your own conversation.

:- Doug.

Which game would you like to play? Which invites you more?

:- Doug.

Ask a little question; respond to it as cheaply as possible: investing as efficient use of your efforts as can be, to arrive not at answer, but at direction.

:- Doug.

How do we make conversation more. . . ?

:- Doug.

There is something more round and about us, not magic, but also unnoticed, which enters our conversations and enters us. This qwoan lifts us, invites us, engages our imaginations. And we walk away.

:- Doug

Watch the movie extras and you may catch a filmographer or director saying, “The landscape and its weather was another character.” Like that, your landscape and weather might be a player in your conversation, one who does not often say, “Notice me. I’m here,” nevertheless one who invites you here.

:- Doug.

When we see any part of our placing—ourselves, the other person, the setting, the task—as our adversary, we are halfway there. Can we invite us all to go further and see these as collaborators, even so far as seeing us all as one thing?

:- Doug.

Soothe and slow may not get you two long and far, though they stand a good chance.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 2188

Round is our world
Interwoven all of us
Goals are straight line tools
Cannot quantumly leap
To where there is no there

Please pass it on.

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Is the situation—the between—your foe? Or your helper? Maybe is it simply another player, even the log and the water with which you, together, are all rolling? Holding you up, keeping dry, keeping going?

:- Doug.

What are the parts of what I am studying that pull me in? These then can teach me about the pull and push of conversation, and how I can manipulate those, what different perspectives I can discover.

:- Doug.