8 Reflections on Play, Life & Noticing
It’s been a big year for me – busy, saturated, and expansive. Full of work, family, culture, collaborations, travel, and moments of play woven in-between. The last month of 2025, spent moving through East and Southeast Asia, offered shifting rhythms and changing paces. These movements became a practice of paying attention: to what was arising and emerging, to patterns in my remembrances, behaviours, fixations, and curiosities. Here are 8 musings and marinations inspired by the theme of Play – which we are exploring in this year’s Early Doors set of prompts.
1. Playing with history and memory
Returning to places I have lived and loved – especially Hong Kong – reminded me that memory is not fixed – it’s living and reconfiguring. Visiting. where my father once lived, ran, played, and grew up (1945 – 1955), and spending time with his younger brother in the space (now Oil St. cultural centre) allowed me to play with time. I could visualise him, miss him actively and imaginatively, feel close without needing resolution – just presence.
2. Play as emotional literacy
Grief has been revealing itself not as a linear process from denial to acceptance, but as an internal landscape I can access. I’ve come to value it as a deeply human condition – one where sadness, gratitude, vulnerability, and love coexist without hierarchy, often all at once.
3. Playing with paradox
Holding love and pain in the same breath. This applies not only to self and relationships, also to communities, cities, and societies. Bangkok, a place I return to often, embodies this for me: chaos, messiness, and excess alongside beauty, wellness, and free-spiritedness. It’s intense flavours – spicy, sweet, fresh, artificial, unexpected- feel like a metaphor for life itself.
4. Play in quietude
Okinawa offered a peaceful form of play – rooted in slowness, craft, and restraint. The discipline of doing less. Vast sunset skies. When I stopped checking my phone and began orienting through attention, the landscape started to guide me. Following my nose – and getting lost – led me exactly where I needed to be, including an unforgettable Japanese lunch. On a sacred southern island shaped by Ryukyuan mythology, there were no temples or monuments – just beaches, trees, rocks, cliffs, waves, and stories embedded in the land. Slowness became orientation. Attention became trust.
5. Play through fascination and material inquiry
Humans make things and gather things endlessly, surrounding ourselves with objects as if they might reflect us back to ourselves. In the markets and malls of Hong Kong and Bangkok, desire becomes visible & overwhelming: colours, creature collectibles, designer bags, fakes, luxury. Play here could be more about inquiry. What is this object promising me? Wanting stuff is human. What if we slowed the moment and asked what need is actually being named: belonging, comfort, fantasy, identity? And what if attention, rather than ownership, is sometimes enough?
6. Divine play
Across temples in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, I was struck by how much of human creativity and doing is devotional. Offerings, wishes, Buddhas, local deities, cherubic faces, fierce warriors, animal companions, on clouds and lotuses, and abundance. Consumption can be read as a secular echo of spiritual longing – a search for beauty, protection, and reflection of the self in something larger. Bowing to gods and archetypes, making wishes, gathering hopes for the new year: this too is play – a ritualised conversation with uncertainty. Perhaps consumption itself is a displaced ritual, a search for the sacred without naming it.
7. Playing with the non-human
Noticing and being with animals – in forests, water, and urban spaces can be playful, unfolding through shared presence and recognition. Jane Goodall reminded us that meeting the gaze of an animal is a kind of blessing, a moment that asks nothing except attention. On this trip, I’ve had moments with cats, dogs, lizards, butterflies, monkeys, birds, fish (snorkelling is amazing), a ray, a starfish, and a sea snake. 🐈🐕🦎🦋🐒🐦🐠🦈⭐🐍
8. Play through expression and embodiment
This year, play has come through easy expression and movement. Journaling without overthinking. Playing Dixit, Chameleon, and silly role-play card games. When play is light and embraces imperfection, it’s often more honest. I took up pickleball and fully accepted my mid-agedness. It’s a quick, awkward, social game, that wakes the brain through the body. Coordination and responsiveness over control. Laughter and sharpness over competence – fun with friends.