World Building, a resolution for 2021

 My daughter used to spend hours playing with her Fisher-Price peoples, the one’s with the wooden head, lining them up and world building. In fact by dinner time and she was asked to pick up and get ready to eat and then bath and bed, she’d cry—“But I was just getting started!”

I knew exactly what she meant. I’d do the same thing with my Barbies. I’d go over to a friend’s house with several carrying cases and we’d sit on the floor and dress them and decide who was who and what was what and then my mother would call and say she was on the way to pick me up. I’d wail—“But we haven’t had a chance to play!”

I didn’t know that world building was play. That the actual narrative was subordinate to the setting up. All the time invested in dressing and characters, stage setting WAS the play.

Sometimes we lose the forest through the trees. We forget that it is all part of the fun, the eventual outcome=all those fuzzy details.

I think 2021 is going to be about mindfulness to the process, even the dull stuff that precedes what I think is the main event. It’s all good,