1.0 | Play
the greatest story to tell
The last piece I wrote here was three years ago to the day, on my 27th birthday, as I stood on the cusp of a new transition and tried to grapple with what, at that time, felt like a cacophonous symphony of losses, excitements, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
I got more than I bargained for.
There is a funny thing about hindsight, viewed through the smudge-free lenses of wisdom—lenses milled through realized experience and polished by sheer overcoming. Lenses that unblur lessons that feel both profound and obvious.
To judge the past with the knowledge of the present would be impossible without the past first creating the very circumstances that forged that knowledge.
And yet, we judge. Perhaps from hope, as if, somehow, the wisdom of the present could reach back and reframe what has already been written. As if the past itself were not the necessary path to the present.
I’ve questioned my decisions often, my past—what was in my control, and what I thought was in my control.
I don’t think it’s been helpful.
I’ve learned instead to see my choices, the world I shaped, and the person I’ve become as always having been the right ones.
Not because they were objectively right, but because they were right answers for the worldview I held at the time. The story I chose to live, where my actions declared my reality.
To me, the integrity of my self-trust is paramount, and so if I believe in the integrity of my internal tools, then the only thing requiring refinement is my worldview—not by default, my ability to navigate it.
It’s easier written than done, but I’ve come to realize that life, at its core, is an exercise in learning to play again.
Since I last wrote here, I’ve been through more ups and downs—really, helical loops—circling through patterns and lessons. I’ve experienced the highs of some of life’s greatest joys and the inevitable descent of sorrow that follows.
Each new chapter of life blossoming with new opportunities, relationships, and experiences, colliding with my refining sense of self, my inner demons, and the unpredictable impact of others’ choices on me.
And each chapter, cyclically, frustratingly, often abruptly, ended. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes by circumstance. And then, as that desolate page turned, the next chapter began.
I’ve cycled through new highs, abrupt endings, and the quiet dissolving of past selves. And yet, the more I observe these shifting patterns, the more I return to a Sanskrit word I grew up with: Maya.
A quick search will tell you it means “illusion”—specifically, the illusion of the phenomenal world.
I’ve learned to take its spiritual inklings in stride. The mythology and eastern philosophy I was raised with shape a more fluid meaning, a semantic cloud that resists the isolating choice of a single translation. Language often fails when it tries to distill an idea from one cultural consciousness into another, falling instead into a lexical gap as the translation strips away the nuance of its lived experience and cultural grounding.
So instead, I think of Maya as a play—a grand stage upon which we perform daily, shifting masks and personas to fit the stories we choose to live. We engage with the people who orbit our immediate world either personally or virtually, unaware of the countless others whose stories unfold beyond our line of sight.
It’s like the plays that we love to watch—in films, in books, or in the quiet schadenfreude of watching someone else navigate the rollercoaster of life. We immerse ourselves, emotionally invested in narratives we know are fiction, just as we invest in our own life. We believe, with temporary delusional confidence, that the robot truly fell in love, that the protagonist really did reconcile their grief, that tragedy had to unfold just so, dictated by fate rather than chaos. We know it’s not real. And yet, we play along, manipulating that world in our imagination.
It’s like the way a child leaps off a swing just to feel the split second of flight before hitting the dirt. The way a game of pretend becomes life-or-death for an afternoon, only to be forgotten by dinner. Play feels serious in the moment but weightless in the long run. The ability to hold both dialectics in hand at once allows neither seriousness nor weightlessness to take hold of us.
Maya is the play that fades when we close the curtains of our eyes each night, surrendering to a night of dreams—no different from our waking life, just less bound by coherence. We laugh at the absurdity of falling out of the sky on our seventeenth attempt to fly, yet wake to live another act. An act filled with sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, beginning again, in our next beat—a new story or an old classic, with a repeat cast or an ensemble of new faces.
It’s a word used to describe the ludicrousness of it all, of the stories we choose to believe and thus live, the people we cling to as anchors, and the selves we construct, knowing they are always in flux, dissolving and reforming.
It is the default script of reactivity, where life unfolds on autopilot, dictated by our silo of habit, obsession, and neurosis, leaving us unaware that the game is playable.
There is no fixed script. The stability we crave is just an illusion—a desire to escape responsibility, to live without the burden of freedom, the burden of weightlessness, without the suffering that choice entails. It is the comfort formed from decades spent reacting—watching reruns of the same episode, lulling us into stagnation, stripping away the very poignancy that gives life its thrill.
And yet there exists a boldness to life, where life isn’t a state, but a forceful determined engagement. To become a confluence of life and existence, two rivers meeting in endless motion, swirling, shifting, shaping the self anew, liberated from the responsibility of a contrived and predetermined role.
We admire those who radiate this energy – who are undeniably alive.
We may have even been them once.
In a state of being, full of vitality.
If Maya is the grand illusion, then childhood is the default time we engage with it fully, unburdened by the need to make sense of it.
Play, from our childhood, is a full-bodied experience—intense and immediate, yet fleeting.
It’s the way a child runs, then falls, then laughs at the fall before getting up to try again, unbothered by the failure, finding exhilaration in the motion itself.
It’s how a game invented in the span of a few seconds—an empire built of sticks, shadows, and whimsically shifting rules—becomes the most important thing in the world, only to be abandoned without regard when something else becomes important.
It’s the unfiltered testing of reality. What happens if I jump from here? What if I pretend to be a lion? How far can I run? How do you react to my ridiculous idea?
Every action is a question, a hypothesis, an experiment. Every failure is folded into the next attempt. The stakes feel high, but the consequences are light.
In play, emotions run hot—laughter, frustration, triumph, heartbreak—but nothing lingers. Tears dry fast, and bruises are forgotten and healed. A feud over an imaginary meal is mended in seconds when a new adventure calls. There is no burden of permanence, no need to make sense of it all.
It is life in motion, unencumbered by self-judgment or the fear of looking foolish.
To play is to live lightly, but completely.
Life then is not the opposite of death, it’s the continual engagement despite the lure of comfort.
To live is to destroy one’s identity repeatedly—letting go of past traumas, realizations, regrets, and victories alike—in favor of what is necessary to be present.
To live is to learn, to dismantle faulty constructs, and rebuild them to hold the new.
To live is to play—with ourselves, with our relationships, with our conception of existence. To test the boundaries of the material and immaterial, of people, of ourselves, to cultivate the ability to see things as they are.
To continually play is to tell the greatest story our life can offer.
A story that, in its telling, becomes the meaning of life.
I sit here now, three years later, on the cusp of a new decade of life, one that everyone seems to have an opinion on. Your 30s, as I’ve been told, is when you leave the chaos of your 20s behind, find a renewed sense of self and identity, solidify the people that matter to your core, stabilize your relationships, start experiencing the highs of your career, beckon the start of a new family, and build solidarity with community.
It’s often a loss of people, watching former friends and lovers move on, watching the slow decay of family and older loved ones, and confronting in the mirror our own frailness and temporality.
It’s all a stark declaration, one that I imagine comes from a milkshake of hope, expectations, reassignment, progress, self knowledge, and a honest confrontation with reality.
For me, these things are neither something to chase, nor understand, nor something I even expect to grasp.
I have an inkling that life doesn’t set, clarity doesn’t emerge, and that I don’t get to be subsumed by the stability of my own comforting realizations.
I hope instead, to develop more awareness of my world and the immaterial in my mind, to continue to exercise my agency in the world, to curate and tend to the beauty I find daily. I hope to have more time with the people I cherish, and to cherish the world I get to occupy for this season of my life.
And in all of that, to continue playing—building, testing, learning, failing, and trying—on that edge between life and death.
To be caught up in living so fully that the need for answers dissolves into the simple act of play.