A human workspace, like all soulful endeavors, is based on the principle of friendship and so fosters friendship among workers, as well as an atmosphere of friendliness, an important cousin to friendship. Friendship is one of the main signs that soul is present, and yet some business owners and managers worry that friendship will slow production. Many workers feel inspired to do their work well because of the friends they have on the job.

“Children see events through hypersensitive eyes and have their own magnified impressions about the world. They often explode in joy, but their happiness offsets deep fears and dreads. Their pain can be so devastating as to upset their very souls. In this bigger-than-life arena, parents are figures of myth, literally.

The care of a child’s soul requires restraint and close observation. You have to see how the child finds ways to allow her essence to manifest. A parent’s job as soul educator is to “lead out” the child’s soul into actual life, and this will give rise to a unique individual. Educere, one Latin root of education, means “to lead out.” The other, educare, means “to raise and teach.” If you’re really doing education, you don’t put things into the child, you lead out what is already there and is uniquely the child’s. You can’t expect the child to be like other children or indeed like you.

When I have done couples therapy in the past, on occasion I asked one partner to sit in a chair off to the side while I worked with the dreams and life stories of the other. My idea was that the people did not really know each other. Maybe by listening to each other and exploring their psyches they might have more empathy and a deeper appreciation for what the other was dealing with. As couples share their lives, they may come to think that they really know the other well. But that kind of intimacy can be misleading. Familiarity is not knowledge, and, in fact, it may be a block to really knowing the partner as a separate person. Some distance is necessary, hence my practice of attending to one person at a time. I encourage the one partner to be a close observer, perhaps gaining some empathy for the other. By listening to the soul I mean hearing the story that can’t be told.

The artist should never lose the spirit of play. It is curious how sometimes the biggest tasks are best approached tangentially, with a smile in the soul. Much has been written about the seriousness with which important work has to be undertaken. I believe that seriousness and rigour are invaluable, and hard work indispensable — but I want to speak a little for the mysterious and humble might of a playful creative spirit. Playfulness lightens all terrifying endeavours. It humanises them, and brings them within the realm of childhood. The

playfulness becomes absorbing, engrossing, all-consuming, serious even. The spirit warms. Memory burns brightly. The fires of intelligence blaze away, and self- consciousness evaporates. Then — wonderfully — the soul finds the sea; and the usually divided selves function, luminously, as one.

The play soon becomes its own sustenance. ‘I wonder how far I can take this?’ the smiling self asks. And the spirit of the encounter answers by taking leaps into the unknown, and creating terra firma for itself to land on. It answers by inventing roads where none exist, extending ones that do. In short, out of the place where playfulness and inspiration meet, come ideas and possibilities more astonishing, more solid, and more profound than can be pulled out of-a solemn and sententious disposition.