People, We’ve Got to Grow.

The world that we live in both shapes us and is shaped by us. It’s always been violent and peaceful, loving and hateful (as are we). These past few years, though, the violence and hatred feel more frightening, more painful; the devastation and despair more intense and soul-wrenching, the newest tragedy not merely additive, but affecting our subjectively qualitatively. I wonder how you’re doing.

I doubt that this will be of any comfort, but it might give you something else to think about or to feel, or another way to think about what you are thinking about and what you are feeling. I hear a message from the past years’ events and it’s loud and clear— “People, we’ve got to grow.” We cannot handle the world the way we are. We cannot handle it emotionally without creating new emotions. We cannot handle it politically without creating new ways to do politics. We cannot handle it intellectually without creating new ways to think and understand. We cannot handle it socially without creating new ways to talk with, listen to and be with others. That’s some of what I mean by our needing to grow.

Growing is hard; developing is hard; qualitative change is hard under any circumstances. It upsets our equilibrium or, more to the point, our false sense of equilibrium. It’s hard to admit that the way we are is not up to the task at hand, because that actually means that you and we don’t know what to do. And that’s scary, given who we “are.” But the growing us, the developing us, the qualitatively changing us create the space to realize, accept and even rejoice in the fact that not only don’t we know but that we cannot know.

Knowing is currently our default setting. We’ve come to take it for granted that we have to know things—what to do, the facts of the matter, who’s to blame, what will happen if—and that we have to act based on what we know. This way of being in the world dominates strategies, tactics, conversations and more, but it’s not working anymore. Our rational thinking and problem-solving, our cognitive capacities—our epistemic posture, if you will— are not up to the tasks history is raising for us. Because living by a knowing paradigm stifles creativity and discovery, closes off other ways of understanding, and constrains our ability to imagine and create a new world.

What does open up creativity and unleash our imagination? Answer: Play. Not only for children, but for people of all ages, for families and for communities. I think of play as a twin sister of performance, as in theatrical performance. Performance is a kind of adult play, and children’s play is a kind of performance.

Among the magnificent aspects of play is that it is the antidote to what I call our overweight brain, that obsession with knowing that keeps us stuck in doing what we know how to do, speaking in the ways we know how to speak, thinking and seeing in ways we’ve been accustomed to.

Playing and performing are forms of non-knowing growing. They’re the main ways we create our development, as individuals, families, groups and communities. To handle the world that shapes us and that is shaped by us, we have to create ours and its new performance . “People, we gotta grow” means, “People, we gotta play and perform.”