Life-Play

By David Shepherd

Ann Lorda, while running her cleaning agency, said to me this morning, “My life is what’s happening on the other end of the phone.” I think millions of people over the globe would agree with her. Many would be complaining of being sucked under mounting details. Others would find themselves burdened by boring accounts from remote friends. After all, the phone can fill lives up easier than games or parties or travel.

For myself, when I call a fellow Life-Player, I find my life is instantly enriched. I’m about to be asked in detail what I felt about last week or what I imagine can happen tomorrow. I’m about to be plunged into the first words of a story that I’ll carry effortlessly to its end.

And I’m going to have to drag, from my subconscious, characters that suddenly acquire clearly defined voices and behaviors—all unknown to me before I picked up the phone. My moral and political face acquires fresh features. How does this happen?

It doesn’t have to happen if, during a dreary week, nothing occurs, I talk to no one and I go nowhere. Then, when I play I find myself inventing stuff with no correlation to fact. I’m telling my partner a lie.

What to do? I’m beginning to scan my life daily. What DID happen last week? Of the few or many people I met, which ones are important enough to grab? How did they stand, sit, move head (or hand)? What was guiding them to me, and how fast, slow or coherently did they speak? I’m getting my life ready to be played—filling in the chinks where I’m too lazy to call myself into account. I’m demanding more consciousness, more accurate memory, more detail and a clearer opinion of myself by myself. I’m insisting I reach out, touch, explore, discover and confirm more near by and far away.

Soon I’ll be able to say, I hope, “What is on the other end of the phone is Me”—laid out day by day, encounter by encounter, dream by would-be-dream. Look! I am clearly more vibrant and confrontational than the person who reaches for a phone in a fog.