Practice

A doctrine that stays on the page is furniture. Here is how you get off it.

There are no commandments in what follows. Commandments require enforcement, enforcement requires hierarchy, and our entire org chart is made of animals who have never held a meeting.

No one is the whole list. You have met pieces of it, in different people, and liked all of them.

As a Person

Curious like a child. Wise like someone who has suffered. Playful like a trickster, which is a form of paying attention.

The Unaserist balances ambition with irreverence — willing to build, never willing to worship what is built. The pyramids are magnificent yet their architects are just as dead as everyone else, and the pharaohs stand in museums being looked at by bored children.

They laugh at their own contradictions, because they arrived early and got good seats. They have fallen into the abyss and cracked a joke on the way down, which is the most dignified way to travel.

They hold doubt the way others hold certainty: gratefully. Doubt is proof of being alive. The dead are famously sure of things.

As a Partner

Bring levity to tension. Bring laughter to conflict — not to dodge the conflict, but to remind you both that you are two animals in a kitchen, upset about a calendar.

Love without possession. Hold lightly and deeply at once; the paradox is the practice. Refuse the heaviness of roles — where one of you is the adult and one of you is under review.

Play at relationship as co-creation instead, ideally with snacks. The couples who last are not the ones who never wobble. They are the ones who made the wobble a dance step and refused to admit it was ever anything else.

As a Parent

Teach children resilience by showing them how to laugh at failure — yours first. They are watching how you fall long before they listen to how you talk.

Model that play and responsibility are not opposites. Children have never believed they were, and spend years being talked out of it. Invite wonder into the ordinary: why the moon follows the car, why the dog does that, why anyone agreed to Tuesdays.

A child raised Unaseriously will not remember you as someone who had it figured out. They will remember you as someone who played with them even when tired. One of those you can fake. The other one you cannot.

As a Creator

Design for delight as much as function. Believe that a thing can be profound and ridiculous, because the best things are. Check the platypus.

Create as though failure is a punchline, not a death sentence. Honour imperfection. Parody pretension, especially your own; nobody knows the material better. Build playfully, and build playful things; it shows either way. Leave false gravitas to the others — for it is mostly fear with a vocabulary.

As a Friend

See connection as sacred without demanding it be perfect. Show up when things fall apart. And know the other duty, the one nobody thanks you for: reminding a person, gently, at the correct moment, that the sky has not actually fallen. It only sagged. Skies do that.

The Unaserious friend is the one who can sit in the middle of your contradiction — the joy and the grief, the strength and the mess — without rushing to fix it. Fixing is mostly discomfort in a hurry.

The Resonances

We did not invent the neighbourhood. We just built the strange house on the corner.

Stoicism says: control what you can, accept what you cannot.
Buddhism says: detach from craving, and suffering lessens.
Taoism says: flow with the Way; resist nothing.
Absurdism says: life is meaningless; embrace it.
Unaserism says: play with it all — because you don't get to keep any of it.

We accept fate, and laugh at it. We embrace suffering, and hand it a red nose. We flow with the Way, and trip, and get up, and call the trip choreography. The Absurdist stares into the void; we step into the void with our arms out — because if the void has no floor, what is the difference?

The elders of those older houses would likely not approve. The best of them, we suspect, would be trying hard not to smile.

The Daily Questions

Asked and left alone:

What can I give away before anyone notices?
Is this actually an emergency, or is it just loud?
Where did I stay amused when gravity came to collect?

These are not questions seeking answers. Nobody is marking them. Ask them badly. They work anyway.

The Daily Practice

Nothing is required. The following is merely what tends to happen to people who stay:

Morning — one playful thing, done on purpose, before The Serious clocks in.
Midday — one paradox, noticed and left unsolved, as an offering.
Evening — one honest laugh at yourself. This is the tithe. It is the only one, and you keep it.

Here endeth the practice. It doesn't, though. That was a formality.