A Secret Play Date

Every Tuesday.

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Last Saturday, I climbed up the ladder to the treehouse where the Society of the Secret Play Date was meeting for, you know, Play-Dating (next meeting: January 24!)

I've been playing lately with a few related things.

• Permission to just play. Play practice. To just make art without also whispering to myself, hey, look how much this'll help your business (even if that's true. Which it is).

• Permission to take photos during my Play Date. It was discovered that this was verboten (only for me -- not for other photo-taking Play-Daters. For them, it was fabulous), and so I've been seeing how that feels.

• Permission to make art with digital tools. Again, another newly discovered rule that, yes, applies only to me.

But I found, as I was getting ready to meet up with the Society, that something else was calling me, so I listened.

The 'Why Not Now?' page (did you see the nice new logotype that Stellarvisions made for it?) wants attention and on Saturday, it was sending me secret messages.

Tea! Cookies!

So I decided that my Play Date would be: to have tea with the page, or possibly the program itself.

I brewed some nice licorice tea and served us some cookies.

And we chatted.

It was a little like seeing a therapist.

I yammered on, and the page nodded and went, mmm hmm.

Both 'Why Not Now?' the page, and 'Why Not Now?' the program gave me advice about rewriting it -- not what language to use, but what to invoke in myself when I write it.

They told me to breathe.

Then, taking a sip of tea, the conversation veered off in a different direction, about how important 'Why Not Now?' will be for me this year.

And -- they're so smart -- they could see right away that, just in asking that question I was revealing what it was really about: my relationship with uncertainty.

Ohhh. Right.

I scribbled and scribbled (because I was documenting the whole thing, of course) and before we knew it, my timer went off, telling me I needed to get back to the secret club house.

Huh. So useful. As usual.

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Join me?

You can check in here in the comments or on the Secret Play Date page on Facebook to let us know how you're doing, and give a yay for the people who are joining in.

You could post it on twitter with the #secretplaydate hashtag.

You don't have to share, though.

You could note it in your journal, or whisper it to the cat, and still feel the glow of being part of a group that does things a little differently for an hour every Tuesday.

And if you're not sure where to start, there's always the Secret Play Date DIY Kit.

Could you use a little Play-Dating today?

And pssst: you can still Play-Date and check in with us, even if it's not Tuesday anymore.