In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the expert’s there are few.*
(Shunryu Suzuki)

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and “unknowing,” and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.  I have never figured out why unknowing becomes another kind of knowing, but it surely seems to be.**
(Richard Rohr)

We often measure our day by what we have already known and what we are able too imagine.  But life and the universe are very big, unfolding places and how do we measure a day against the things we do not know, neither can we imagine?

Perhaps the gap is another form of measure.

For Umberto Eco this was a library of 35,000 books, most of which he’d never read, a reminder for him of how much he didn’t know.

It will be our playfulness that carries us into what we do not know, playfulness containing seriousness rather than seriousness containing play – just as the infinite carries the finite within it whilst the finite struggles to contain the infinite:

‘The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. […] We have to conclude, therefore, that civilisation is, in its earliest phases, played.  It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.’^

We are all players, every one of us.

(*Shunryu Suzuki, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)