Profundify It!

Search Twitter at #profundifyit to find the daily quest.

Here is this month's Profound Essay by Kelly Anderson. You can learn more about Kelly on our Profound Posts Contributor's tab. She is a regular contributor to this series, and always brings new and interesting ways to broach this topic of profound living.

This month, she has created a new game for us - Profundify It!

Let's play!

~Michael

Profundify It!

By

Kelly Anderson, Gamemaster

“ How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The Moments

I’m looking forward to a friend’s upcoming wedding, so I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought to special occasions. Big celebrations create some of the best opportunities for deeply moving, profound moments in our lives. Brides and grooms and their friends and families put great thought and planning and energy into creating perfect settings and lasting memories. Flowers and music and smiles and dancing and breathtakingly beautiful gowns and people and eternal vows leave lasting imprints on our hearts. I cherish these all too rare and fleeting moments in life. These profound moments.

Thoughts of the profound have also led me to think about the moments that are not at all rare and fleeting, the moments that are tedious and boring and monotonous and insignificant. Time spent doing the same routine or mindless thing every day, or every week, or every month. Day after day, week after week, month after month. These times are very rarely deeply moving or profound.

The Sum

As I’ve thought about the contrast between the special, momentous occasions which lift us up and add sparkle to life and the common, insignificant activities which oftentimes seem to mire us in the mud, my mind keeps returning to a creative story I once read. Sum is a little vignette of what the hereafter might be like. In this fantastical fable “you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.” In this afterlife, a person might spend twenty-three consecutive days doing nothing but attending weddings, and they might also spend six days clipping their fingernails followed by two-hundred days in the shower.

Please don’t worry, I don’t believe there’s even the remotest possibility that this is what awaits us in the afterlife. However, the imaginative little tale has led me to rethink how I view the common, mindless ways I spend a few minutes here and there while I’m living my Earthly life. For example, instead of thinking of the time spent brushing my teeth as two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening, what if I think of it as eighty days of my life. Of course, it’s eighty days well spent, oral hygiene is important. But eighty days of doing nothing but mindlessly brushing my teeth sounds miserable. And that thought has revealed an opportunity.

In the SAS Talk presented by Michael and Davin, Michael emphasized that profound living occurs in the present moment. A profound life has been described as seeking things such as gratitude, growth, depth, understanding, connection, adventure, mystery, vulnerability, joy, meaning, and wonder - in each moment. Maybe those few minutes of a daily common, insignificant activity could be turned into the meaningful moments of a profound life.

So, what if I use the time spent brushing my teeth each day as an opportunity to profundify a collective eighty days of my life. The structure and the cues are already there. Pressing the little button on my Sonicare could trigger something more than mindlessly moving the vibrating brush around each tooth. Maybe it could also be a signal for me to engage my mind in adventurous thought and intentionally seek to bring more meaning and depth to those two minutes. What if pressing that Sonicare button could begin my two-minutes of “brushing and gratefulness”, where I methodically move the brush around each tooth while I contemplate the Gratefulness.Org “Word of the Day”, and how I might apply it in my life. Or I could do “brushing and smiles”, where I brush while I mentally plan my strategy to elicit smiles from the people I’ll encounter that day, until the two-minute timer stops the whirring brush. After a lifetime, I would have spent a total of eighty days thinking of beautiful quotes about gratitude, or smiling people, or whatever wonderful mental adventure I incorporated into my brushing routine. That seems meaningful and profound to me.

I love this idea, and I plan to have lots of fun profundifying countless rather boring activities. However, this would be even more fun with some friends. And, of course, it would be the most fun if it were a game.

Fortunately, Michael Kroth, our profoundly inspiring leader, has set the stage for the game. In his September 7, 2018 Profundify! , Michael challenged me to create a Game of Profundify . I enthusiastically accepted.

The Game

Using the game elements I outlined in The Game of Awe , I’ve designed Profundify It: A Game . The game will be played between October 7 - 13 in Twitter, tag #profundifyit. The key components are:

• The Challenge: Profundify common, routine moments to shape a profound life.
  
• The Quests: Each day, respond to the tweets with the #profundifyit tag from @kanundrum59 (the gamemaster) with creative ways to profundify the day’s common activity. Search for #profundifyit to find the daily quest.
  
• The Power Ups: Test out your own ideas or the ideas contributed by others in the #profundifyit threads.
  
• The Allies: We’re all supportive allies.
  
• The Secret Identity: Your Twitter handle will represent your secret and profound superpower.
  
• The Score: One point will be awarded for each tweet tagged #profundifyit. These can be comments in the daily quest thread or responses to others' comments. The Leaderboard will be tweeted each day, recognizing the game and daily point leaders.
  

Get your game on and #profundifyit. I’ll see you in the twittersphere.

Recommended Resources:

http://gratefulness.org

David Eagleman: Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives

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