Playfully Manifest a Meaningful Life
Excerpted from Hop, Skip, Jump by Marney Makridakis | Posted 1/1/2014 | Updated 4/29/23
Jenga, the name of the popular stacking game, means “build it” in Swahili. Imagine you are building your ideal life. If you could use any materials in the world, what would you use?
The phrase “If you build it, he will come” holds a lot of energy in the Hop phase. In the film Field of Dreams, it was the voice that Kevin Costner’s character heard whispered whenever he visited the field. It was the voice he listened to whenever he faced doubts.
When you think of “If you build it, he will come,” what is your “it”? What are you building? Organizations, companies, and businesses have mission statements to clarify what they want to build. Contemporary personal development books encourage us to write a mission statement to encompass who we are and what we want to create.
In the interests of total self-disclosure, a mission statement is one of the aspects of the Hop phase where I roll my eyes and get a little bored. Somehow, the very term mission statement and its usage in our society feel so serious. The term also implies there is something finite about a mission. As my client Judy said, “I’m afraid to write a mission statement because then it’s official. Then I can’t change it.”
What if a mission statement could be playful? What if your mission, like you, could be ever evolving, ever changing, and always expanding? While a mission statement can feel intimidating or limiting, you can try a “mission paintment”: a spontaneous work of art that expresses your vision with bold colors, wild strokes, and evolving designs.
Excerpted from Hop, Skip, Jump: 75 Ways to Playfully Manifest a Meaningful Life ©2014 Marney Makridakis. Printed with permission of NewWorldLibrary.com.
Marney K. Makridakis is the author of Creating Time and Hop, Skip, Jump and founder of the online community Artella Land. ...
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