I have been doing a little bit of gaming recently, there is something about getting fully engaged in gaming that has a flavour of naiveté for me. It might be because when I was much younger I spent so many years gaming. I have many many memories of the incredible amount of fun I had gaming as a child, it was the sort of fun that I cannot seem to be able to recreate as an adult,
nothing quite ‘hits’ the same.
But is it the world that has somehow morphed into a dead/passive place or was it ‘me’?
It’s hard to describe but there is this ambience of being fully lost in/engulfed by the experience, there is a sense of experiencing it for the very first time, there is a magic to it, I have so many memories just like this.
The reason I have not done any gaming since late teenager/adult is because I had to invest into ‘myself’, I had to go ‘out there’ and become a ‘someone’, and gaming is a waste of time is it not 
? I simply wouldn’t allow myself to fully enjoy the doing of something for no other reason than the enjoyment of it. Because that would be ‘a waste of time’. Everything became a means to an end, a means to amass and to become ‘more’.
This is what took away that simple enjoyment of being alive that I remember as a child, I have countless memories of that place which have become unlocked over time, that same flavour is in all of them, and it is such an incredible flavour.
It is a funny ‘problem’ really, and I know I am not the only one who experiences it because you always hear about life becoming a chore when you grow up, all those responsibilities and obligations, all those things that apparently I have to look out for!
And I am still invested in that worldview… As I was gaming yesterday and having a great time, there was a feeling that I need to get to the gym and train martial arts, that I will be a no-one soon if I don’t start putting in the work again, once more it is that obligation and responsibility.
I started questioning just whom am I obligated towards? Is it my students, my main instructor, my training partners? Am I not choosing to train/coach martial arts of my own accord, do I really owe any of them anything?
All the pressure of responsibility/obligation comes from the inside, from ‘me’. It is not actually coming from ‘out there’ as I believed, ‘I’ am the culprit. There is an incredible freedom to be found here, and I know it! It is like I am standing on the precipice of it 
It is like there is a film of ‘seriousness’ that overlays the world, keeping me locked out of that place that I know so well. The great thing is that this ‘seriousness’ has less and less to justify itself, in fact very little now it seems, it seems more habitual than anything at this point.