PLAY

Play is the life-blood of relationship.

Relationship is being-with an other, which is only a slight variation on being-here oneself.
Being-here is the primary (physical/metaphysical) manifestation of energeia in this world of things. Energeia is the generative source of the emptiness of all that are energized with it.
Energeia is what things that are-here have but do not own.

Hence, emptiness.

Relationship is a correlate of the universal emptiness that characterizes all of visible reality.
One being-with another is the mutual possession of emptiness.

That there even are “others” at all is explicable only as a by-product of evolution.
Evolution is driven by emptiness (which is driven by energeia); evolution entails the irremediable alienation of progeny from origin, creating an anomalous (unplanned, unnecessary, undetermined, unanticipated) duality that belies the sufficiency of the substrate sameness ― the being-here ― that both share.
That fundamental sameness generates a self-embrace that includes the emergent other. It opens each one’s conatus to include in its sphere of concern all things evolved from the original substrate.

Hence, relationship.

To be with any other is a modality of being-here yourself.
You embrace the other as yourself, because physically/metaphysically the other is yourself

When you are-with an other in this most seminal, metaphysical, sense, you are bound in an embrace that does not require interaction because it is grounded in the pre-existent substrate monism: the raw, invariable unity of the energeia of being-here. The relationship ― the bond ― is fully realized from the moment of emanation.
Nothing more needs to be done. No further action is necessary.

The paradox of all things being simultaneously “one” and “many” is resolved, not metaphysically but practically, through a fictional interaction that can only occur because of the irreducible reality of both.

That fictional interaction is play.

Play is what you do when you are not doing anything but just being-here-with another.
Meditation, friendship, prayer ― they are all play. They do nothing for they are all merely being-with.

Play is what you do when there is nothing to do  . . .  and you are actually doing nothing.

Emptiness is givenness; and since having been given is the very ground of possibility of anything being-here at all, all things are immediately and inextricably related in and through the common exercise of an energeia that belongs to no one but is possessed completely and equally by all. Nothing more is required to activate this relationship. It comes activated. Any interaction between and among things is totally redundant, unnecessary, spontaneous and creative:

it is play.

All inter-activity is superfluous, for nothing that is-here owns, or ever loses its being-here.
There is nothing to do, ever.
To be-here is to play.