Picture your decisions as situation rooms in your home, each room populated by lawyers advocating for and against the options you face.

Some of these lawyers are welcome company presenting options that please you. And some are unwelcome, representing options that worry you, inconvenient choices and their consequences you’d rather not face.

To enter a situation room is to face a decision and, as with entering a room at any social gathering, some rooms feel easier to enter and stay in than others. You scan the room, see who’s present and if everyone feels like safe company, you feel no urge to exit. But if scanning the room you spot dreaded company, you mutter, “Oh, Jeez, she’s in here. No way do I want to face her. I’m outta here” and duck out as soon as you can.

There are situation rooms in the house you never enter, simply because your decision is made. You have your MO, your modus operandi, a plan you’ve committed to and never think about anymore. For example, you’re committed to raising your children, and there’s no way you’ll re-evaluate that MO. It’s a done deal.

Yeah, maybe you’ll look back on your life and decide that raising kids wasn’t worth it. If you entered the “Should I raise my kids?” situation room, you might encounter an advocate who would tell you your MO is a dead end. You should cut your losses in child rearing before wasting anymore of your life on raising them.

But you don’t go there. In for a penny, in for a pound–you’re committed to raising your children. That’s your MO and you’re sticking with it.

Other rooms you’re happy to enter. You’re not sure what to do yet about the decisions in them but none of the advocates in these rooms scare you. For example, you’ve got money and it’s time to buy new car. You’re happy to visit your car-decision situation room. In there you’ll find advocates encouraging you to choose any of a variety of cars, but you’re happy to face any of the options they present.  Entering that room is like entering a room at a party where you’re popular enough to feel safe with anyone you might encounter.

There are other decisions, or situation rooms you’re ambivalent about, drawn to because the decision feels pressing, but averse to entering because you dread facing the options represented in it. For example, for people whose marriages are troubled, there is a room whose door is marked “Should I leave my marriage?”

Imagine being in these people’s predicament.  Entering the room you would find two lawyers, one advocating exit, which would be a relief in some ways, but scary too because you’re not really sure how you would get by, whether you’d ever find another partner, or be contented alone. The other lawyer advocates staying in the marriage, which again would be easier in some ways, but scary in others, the consequences including the possibility that you’ll regret having stayed, the marriage stifling your spirit, and proving unsustainable in the long run.

You’re choosing between the lesser of two evils, the best of two dreaded options, options you don’t want to face so not a room you dare enter or stay in too long.  You’d rather visit other rooms, like maybe that one with the car choice in it, or maybe a room in which the only decision is what to watch on TV this evening.

Trouble is, the advocates leave their rooms sometimes, finding you and tapping you on the shoulder wherever else you are.  You were minding your own business during a TV ad when suddenly you find yourself in yet another argument with your husband.

Your show comes back on but the argument has rekindled in you doubts about whether your marriage is sustainable.  Your MO is to just watch TV but the option to leave your marriage, represented by an advocate, has come out of the room to find you.  He tapped you on the shoulder, nagging you to revisit the room marked “Should I leave the marriage?” a room you dread visiting because all of the options you encounter in it are scary.

You have your MO’s, your choices made. You’re just living those choices, maybe enthusiastically, maybe just by force of habit, but with some MOmentum, the ongoing work you do to live out your MO, for example showing up for your children, your marriage, your work, your hobbies, your church–anything you are committed to doing, no questions asked.

The more frequently those advocates come out of their rooms to tap you on the shoulder, the harder it is to sustain your MOmentum.  They eat into your MOjo, the enthusiasm that fuels your MOmentum.  When your MOjo flags, when your enthusiasm is sapped you feel compelled to revisit whether your MO makes sense. The advocates who tap you on your shoulder sap your MOjo, saying for example, “Hey, you’re plan ain’t working, it’s time for you to rethink your commitment to this MO. Come visit the situation room and consider other options you can slot into position as your replacement MO, ‘cause there must be something better than this.”

We all have ways to ward off advocates like these, ways to say “Nope, not going there.”.  When you feel you can’t face your options, you can leave things to chance, saying, “it’s not up to me,” or “I should just go with the flow.” You can call it sinful to revisit a room, counting the rooms as off limits for moral reasons.  You can distract yourself in other rooms where the decisions are easier, the options more pleasant, no advocate too scary to face, like which car to buy or what to watch on TV.

Of course, you don’t always enter a situation room alone. Whenever you’re making a choice with other people you enter a situation room together, like arriving at a party with family, spouse, colleagues, friends or collaborators.

Debating something with someone is like entering a room populated with options, to wonder together which option to choose as your collaborative MO. Sometimes you want to stay and attend to the decision, but the other person or people you enter with spot a scary option or two and say, “You know, we don’t belong in here. Let’s move on.” You find yourself trying to drag people into rooms they’d rather not enter, and likewise dragged by others into rooms you don’t want to visit.

In recent articles I’ve explored the joy we experience when we’re in what Mihaly Czikszentmihaly calls “flow” or what I call “serious play.” I said that I experience serious play in situations in which locally “it’s all good,” where none of the choices I face are too daunting and none of the consequences for taking them are too terrible. Here I’m suggesting that serious play is possible in situation rooms that feel like play rooms, no scary options present in the rooms.

I’ve argued elsewhere against the variety of philosophical and spiritual approaches that urge you to simply feel safe everywhere always.  I don’t think they can or should work.  None of us can honestly say it’s all good, or all small stuff.  We can’t accept “what is” in some kind of blanket passive way.  It would be stupid to try.

Still, with effort we can make some dreaded options less dreaded simply by habituating to them, occasionally visiting the rooms where they dwell, staying a little while before exiting relieved to get away.  With time these options become less terrifying, which doesn’t mean they’re the best options or the worst, but ones you can visit calmly as you evaluate your options.

Not all situation rooms can be made into play rooms, but more can than we think, if we learn to identify the options in them that scare us, and make ourselves less scared by spending some time with them, like braving up at an awkward party and saying to the guest you’d least like to see, “You! I thought I might find you here. Dude, what’s up?  What have you got to say for yourself?”

Call it Threat Adaptation Therapy. It’s not cognitive therapy in that it doesn’t simply swap one affirming source of MO-jo for another. And it’s not mindfulness practice, which encourages you to drop all shy aversion to all of what is and could be.  Rather, it’s focused desensitization to the options and consequences that you can’t bring yourself to visit but know you should.

A lot of psychology is too complex and messy to be managed by simple recipes, so when I find an exception, a truly reliable recipe, I use and promote it.

For example, I tell almost every class I teach about mirroring introducing, it by saying “here’s a trick that over the course of my life has saved me thousands of dollars and months of grief.”

Mirroring is a simple and reliable recipe:  In the thick of an argument, switch roles and become your opponent’s lawyer without necessarily agreeing with his position.

Just pause and say, “before we continue, let me makes sure I understand what you’re saying. Correct me if I’m wrong but you’re arguing XY and Z.  Did I hear you correctly?” Mirroring almost always de-escalates the argument.

There’s another recipe I’ve come to rely on, a face-saving, self-dignifying trick that pretty much always works. It’s a lot like mirroring actually, a conflict de-escalator.

The trick is this:  I say sorry as soon as I see a way I might have done something wrong, a swift, clean, specific and thorough sorry with a pledge to do better.

Not because I’m humble—quite the opposite–because I’ve got my pride and I’ve never found a more efficient way to protect it.

I often say “I stand corrected,” which I like because it admits my mistake while maintaining my standing stature, reminding me that to admit a mistake is not to topple my entire being.

Mirroring wouldn’t come naturally to many of us. It’s something that has to be taught.  But saying a simple and complete sorry is something I would think we’d stumble on naturally and so wouldn’t need to be taught.  It works so reliably I’m surprised more people don’t employ it.

I suppose there are alternatives to saying a swift sorry that come more naturally.  When our pride is under attack I can see why we’d offer half-hearted begrudging or sarcastic sorries that let our opponents know we’re feeling put upon and leave them wondering whether the issue is resolved. Or we say iffy sorries like “sorry if you’re frustrated” or “sorry that you’re frustrated,” apologizing without taking any responsibility.

These begrudging apologies rarely work. They make us seem miserly, defensive, prickly and prideful. The longer you half-heartedly apologize the more you pay in the end when you finally concede or when you lose your opponent’s respect and company.

Like they say, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

Maybe swifter sorries would come easier if they didn’t feel thoroughly damning to us, if instead of assuming every correction fells you, you could stand tall while admitting you were wrong.

Maybe swift sorries are hard, if you were raised by wolves who pounced on you at the least sign of weakness, teaching you that a thorough apology is risky (See Infallibility Contests). But among most adults, clean and thorough apologies work much more reliably than the alternatives.

I’ve been writing lately about sources of true resilience.  My last article, for example was about how learning and play are possible only in situations in which “it’s all good” in the limited sense that the possible outcomes are all acceptable to us, situations in which we’re trying to do well, but if we don’t, we’re convinced in our guts we’ll be OK too.

Really convinced:  I don’t think we can pep talk, generalize, philosophize or spiritualize ourselves into feeling that we’ll be OK. There have been lots of attempts at that kind of thing, blandishments about Buddhist acceptance of everything, commitments to carte-blanche affirmation therapy, or unrealistic mantras like “don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff.”

But I do think that we can optimize our resilience by visiting worst-case scenarios and devising plans to be OK if they materialize, asking “what’s the worst that can happen?” not as a rhetorical question, but a real one, visualizing not just success but failure and how you would maximize your wellbeing in the case of it. Elsewhere I’ve called it pre-grieving.

One side benefit of this “visualizing-failure” practice is that sorries come easier.  If the first time you face the possibility of failure is when it materializes or someone accuses you of it, you’re likely to freak out, lock up, and get defensive.  If you’ve pre-grieved and made plans for the possibility of failure before, you can both evaluate the negative feedback more neutrally and you can say a cleaner and swifter “sorry,” if you decide you owe it.

Many of us worry about self-fulfilling prophecies.  We’re superstitious that if we visualize failure, we’ll bring it on.  Of course, if you only visualize failure you might bring it on, but if you visualize the range of outcomes from success to failure and find the particular ways to maximize success across the range of outcomes, my guess is that it mostly limbers you up.

And, of course, there are some circumstances in which it’s positively reckless to ignore the risk of failure. If all negative prophecies were self-fulfilling we’d never practice emergency preparedness for fear that we’ll bring on the emergencies.

Humans are notoriously bad at emergency preparedness.  From earthquake preparedness to estate planning, to even just imagining that we might make mistakes, we don’t like thinking about negative outcomes.

Some of us are living too close to the edge to afford much looking at further disappointment. Some of us are superstitious that if we did visit negative outcomes, the Gods will curse us self-fulfillingly. Some of us are safe enough that we round up to thinking we’re charmed and blessed and can do no wrong.

I’m suggesting that many of us are missing opportunities to learn, to maintain our dignity and to bring peace of mind to those around us when we cower in the comfort zone of self-affirmation, startled into tediously robotic self-defense when someone pops his or her head in to say “I think you made a mistake.”

The phrase, “it’s all good” has always bugged me though really it shouldn’t.  Like any positive superlative it’s a useful exaggeration that purges negativity with absoluteness.  It’s no worse than calling everything totally awesome, saying you adored your French toast or declaring “it’s perfect” when you mean it’s just OK.  These are social lubricants, ways to keep people accentuating the positive in an anxious world.

Still, “It’s all good” explicitly argues for something I can’t accept. It’s not all good unless you define “good” so broadly that it covers “bad” too. If you allow yourself to define things that broadly it’s all French toast too.

But what if the word “all” doesn’t mean everything in the universe but all of the possibilities within a particular context: “In this situation I’ll be fine with whatever happens. It won’t freak me out, cause me despair, our paralyze me.”

I wrote here recently about my love of serious play, AKA flow in positive psychology, the intense joy of being seriously consumed by some playfully creative activity–a video game, art, dancing, playing music or sports, doing a job you love, or being eaten up by curiosity learning something new.

What makes serious play so joyful is a sense of overall safety, that your prospects of succeeding at it are good, but that not succeeding wouldn’t be bad either.  Within the limits of your effort’s possible outcomes, it’s all good.  It’s not all equally good, which is why you’re serious in it—you’ve got some standard you’re seriously trying to meet.  But you’re playful within it because not meeting the standard won’t kill you.  It’s like being a tightrope walker working with a net.  You seriously want to stay on the tightrope, but if you fall you’ll be OK so you’re willing to try varying your technique, playing with ways to get better and better at it.

Maybe some of us have enough confidence that we always feel like we’re working with a net.  Maybe some of us are so anxious that we never feel like we are.  For most of us it takes time and effort to feel comfortable enough in some game that we get the sweet balance of seriousness and play.

Time especially.  I’m a teacher and some days my classes suck. What makes teaching still a joy is a sense of overall confidence, called self-efficacy in positive psychology. I’ve taught well enough for long enough that I’m not keeping score by the class but by the aggregate of all my classes.

As the song says, mama told me there’d be days like this, bad days among the good.  Overall it’s all good, and not because mama, the positive psychologists or the inspirational speakers told me it is, but because my longish teaching experience convinces my gut that though there are ups and downs, the ups prevail enough that I can afford to experiment, playing with variations that sometimes suck but sometimes evolve toward innovations that make the good better.

I love it on bad days not just because tomorrow is another day either, but because there have already been lots of days, enough of them good. Our guts play a percentage game on things we’ve done for a while.

Martin Seligman, a founder of positive psychology speaks to this percentage game approach, saying for example that trauma early in life is more likely to cause depression because, when you’re younger, you’ve had fewer experiences so a trauma looms larger relative to the good.

In parallel, a bad day teaching early on in my career threw me more.  With fewer teaching days under my belt, a bad day would be over-represented in the smaller pool of total teaching days.

Resilience can be cultivated, but mostly it’s a product of how long you’ve been at something.  More at bats; less anxiety when you strike out.  Less anxiety, more capacity for serious creative exploratory evolutionary play since striking out is an OK possibility too.

If you’re gut hasn’t learned from experience that all possible outcomes of an activity are good, can you convince yourself that they are anyway?  Albert Ellis, the pioneer behind cognitive psychology talks about how happier people mind their ABC’s (Adversity, Belief, Consequence) and particularly their B’s. If, for example you fail a test, don’t just leap to the consequent meaning that you’re a failure. Choose your beliefs carefully and lean toward a narrow interpretation, not over-generalizing the failure.  You failed a test?  That just means you failed a test.

Of course, leaning toward narrow interpretation can be dangerous, making people happier perhaps in the short run, but also more oblivious to the underlying patterns that would make them fail tests in the long run.

And there are limits on our range of beliefs. Most of us know what it’s like to begin to suspect an undeniable pattern of failure. You can’t kid yourself into thinking, “hey, I just failed a test—no big deal, it’s all good.”  Perhaps you’ve been in a last-straw situation where one more failed test is going to trigger a consequence you really can’t help but dread.  You can’t feel playful then as though it’s all good.

And there should be limits on our range of beliefs. For the students’ sake, if every class I taught sucked, I hope I’d begin to believe I was a bad teacher.

Given our natural and useful limits on belief, I don’t believe that we can find serious play in everything we do.  Some of our activities are just serious, with little or no play because some possible outcomes aren’t going to feel good, however much we try to believe they are.

Still, we have some leeway in making an activity all good, for example asking a non-rhetorical “what’s the worst that could happen?” and conceiving of some way you can get back on your feet even if your worst-case scenario comes true.

Physicists talk about certain systems as metastable, meaning that they have not one resting state but many. Overall, the system is stable in many positions.

For example, picture a ball rolling down a ridged ramp. The ball having rolled all the way to the bottom would be stable and at rest, but it’s also stable resting inside any of the pockets formed by the ridges.

I think of the arenas where I’m afforded serious play as metastable like that ridged ramp.  I’m on a roll trying to get to the bottom of things, trying to reach the resting state of ultimate success. My ramp is ridged and bumpy and I do get stalled along the way in ruts that keep me from ultimate success, and yet these ruts are all good too—they’re stable enough that I don’t freak out in them. It’s not as though all of the stable states on my ramp are equally good but overall I’m OK with landing in any of them.

And as a teacher I want to create a metastable environment for my students. Learning anything is like a bumpy ramp. Fear of falling short of ultimate success often paralyzes students.  If I want them to experience the serious play of learning I can’t afford to have them freaked out by a bad test score or a wrong answer in class. I need to uphold standards but still it’s got to feel all good enough or they won’t be game to trying to evolve and learn anymore.

There’s a connection here not just to physics but to evolutionary science. We think of evolution as how things change, but really it’s much more about how living systems are peculiar in their ability to stay the same, to keep on keeping on, rebuilding themselves day after day, generation after generation.  Organisms evolve and learn by varying within a stable enough context that they can survive evolution’s trial and error process. Of course some errors can kill you, or terminate a whole lineage. But for any lineage to survive it must be something of a metastable platform on which adaptations can accumulate. It has to be stable enough to persist but metastable (plastic or flexible) enough to allow trial and error. The origins of life is the origin of serious play on metastable platforms where, in our narrow sense, it’s all good.

What if God wanted to create the best of all possible worlds but didn’t know how. Undaunted he tried anyway, the way we would try, by trial and error, creating creatures and then setting them in motion, doing what they do, God watching and learning.

He could intervene but won’t, because, like any good scientist, he knows that tampering mid-experiment contaminates results. World after world, experiment after experiment, he’s been learning, and applying what he learns, crafting new worlds until he gets it right.

His worlds are getting better, so good that we are within a hair’s breadth of the native wit to make this the best of all possible worlds. Between our preprogrammed capacity to evolve, and learn from our mistakes, he has really high hopes that we’d be the one, the best possible world given the necessary physical limits and trade-offs whereby for one creature to survive another must die. Not ideal, but then God is a realist. You got to have physics and with it physical limits.

He’s got opinions about what we could do better, but sharing them with us would contaminate us. He keeps them in his notebook for use in his next world’s design.

There’s theism, the belief that God runs the show manually in real-time, everything you do watched and potentially controlled by God, and there’s Deism, the belief that God set it all in motion but can’t or won’t intervene.

This is R&Deism, a cross between the two, a research and development God who won’t intervene, but isn’t just watching us like some couch potato either. He’s on a mission and has commissioned us in the service of it. We are each trials in life’s trial and error process, and our whole world is a trial in God’s process, his R&D skunk works.

It’s implications for us? Well, for one thing do your best. For another, pay no attention to the God behind the screen. He wants us to go about our business here, not get distracted with appeals to him or claims that we know what in particular he wants.  He’s programmed us to want this to work.  That’s what he wants. And nope, there’s no award for being more devoted to him that other elements in this trial. This working is all the reward we’re getting. And no punishment for failing other than failing either.

Nice to be one of his later-stage trials, maybe a hair’s breadth from the best of all possible worlds. We’re close enough we can almost taste success. But hey if it isn’t us, live and learn, God will try try again.

In all areas of my life, my greatest happiness is a product of an oxymoron.  I love, love, love serious play, rigorous fooling around, tight looseness, focused diffusion.

Like another oxymoron, “Jumbo shrimp” my greatest happiness makes sense if you think about the two words operating at different levels. Jumbo shrimp is about shrimp; within it,  the jumbo variety. When I say I love serious play, I mean that I love play within something I’m serious about, whether it be a vocation, or avocation, a relationship or in my case questions that dogs me delightfully.

In a way, serious play is just another name for the very popular psych concept of “flow,” a known and reliable source of joy and mojo for many, so the research shows.

Avocationally, I’ve got a few such narrowly focused playgrounds. I play jazz and lately I’ve taken up ecstatic dance, which is all the rage here in the Bay Area and beyond. With both, I get a rigorously constructed playground defined by tight, constraints—do’s and don’ts that become the rules of the game.

The game is to play flexibly and freely within those constraints. In music, for example, not everything goes. Some sounds are clearly better than others. A scale, chord or rhythmic groove expresses a mood by constraining options, leaving out things that sound off within context. To improvise within a scale’s rigorous standards is serious play, serious about the limits (for example the “avoid notes” in a scale, but free within the limits to explore like a child at play. Likewise dancing. Not everything is permitted on the dance floor or within any dance style. The goal is to play freely within the dance’s rigorous constraints. To play is to make a commitment to a game’s constraints, to enter the established confines, but feeling and acting unconfined within them.

Relationships are likewise opportunities for play within constraints. You’re serious about the relationship, while exploring the ways to express yourself within it. You depend upon each other and therefore work within the constraints of each other’s standards, while improvising and feeling free within it.

Recently I came to picture the ideal romantic relationship as harkening back to being buddies as little children, an image that came to me triangulated from this famous photo and a Nietzsche quote: “A person’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child at play.”

I love the way the woods frame these two tikes, constraining them along a path and yet with the openness ahead that rivets their forward-leaning playful attention.

In my lucky case, my vocation is my life-size questions. On the back of my business card I list (in very small print) six questions that should keep me busy ‘til the end of my days:

Emergence:  What distinguishes life from non-life and how did life start?

Doubt:  How do and should living beings deal with tough judgment calls?

Listenomics:  How do and should we decide whom to heed, hear, ignore and fight?

Expectation management:  How do and should we decide where to invest and divest effort especially given that at death we must divest all effort?

Ethical don’ts:  To maximize play within the confines of decency what are those confines?  (ethics defined by constraints of the game, objective standards for avoiding being a butthead, so to get beyond merely subjective standards the question becomes “what is a butthead other than someone you butt heads with?”).

Love and economics:  What is the natural history of value and love, and how can we accurately integrate value in life to value in economics?

I’ve been playing with these six a long time, and as I play I come to reliable hunches that become new constraints, answers or at least assumptions I’m going with as I build playfully beyond them.  Each answer breeds new questions, which is what makes the overarching question life-size.

Lucky me, I’ve got relationships with people who share these questions and most of the assumptions I’ve come to hold. For nearly 20 years now, I’ve been part of a very rigorously playful research team dealing with the first of these questions–what is life and how did it start? It’s fun because having arrived at common constraints we don’t spend a lot of time debating them. We get to be playfully dogged exploring within the context of the constraints, celebrating diversity of opinion like little tikes, but within our narrowed path of assumptions.

“To affinity and beyond” I call it, our affinities about the constraints freeing us to explore playfully beyond to the always-next questions, a joy so important to me that I’ve put it to verse:

A.N.D. (Always Next Dilemma)

After finding solutions that fit

I like to kick back and just sit

On my laurels but then a

Resulting dilemma

Proves questions in life just don’t quit.

The Tao says, ““When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly; when people see some things as good, other things become bad.”

This is often interpreted as meaning you should stop seeing things one way or the other, but I don’t buy that we could or should stop. Playing “avoid” notes really does sound bad or ugly.  We can’t help but have such constraints, nor would we want to. Still, the quote explains a lot about human conflict.

As much as I see as beautiful my “Affinity and beyond” relationships I see as ugly dis-affinity, especially when someone else’s idea of rigor blocks the places where I’ve decided to play, or when someone wants to play where my idea of rigor bars it.

You know the feeling, the frustration when someone isn’t serious enough about what you’re serious about, or someone is too serious about what you want to play with.

Sometimes, like a dog looking to play with another dog, I’ll do the human equivalent of bowing low and wagging my tail, asking a question to see if I can spark some collaborative curiosity. Often it works but sometimes the person I ask misinterprets it as an invitation to get Papal, to tell me how the world works as though I were interviewing a great and eminent expert on everything true.

Playing expert is certainly fun. I’m sure I indulge people’s patience sometimes by going papal on them.  I understand the impulse and still, after enduring a respectful amount of preaching and still seeking potential for rigorous play, I’ll try to find openings for a true affinity and beyond interaction.

Lately I’ve tried a new approach to getting beyond people’s papal decrees. I ask “so where are your remaining questions? What do you still wonder about now that you’ve got those answers?”

Sometimes they can’t tell me because they don’t seem to really have any remaining questions, or they decide I’m trying to attack them–no room for serious play at least with questions. But sometimes they share questions I can relate to, and we can find room for the serious play I love.

Where do you find serious play?  What constraints free you to play within them?