Jos de Keijzer wrote the following spoken word text during the Play and Work 2024 event and recited it to close the day.

Meander along with these words.

All the world’s a stage, the world’s a maze. Amazing, wonderful, and strange!

The world is your stage. The planks you fear or dance on.
Where you are watched or from where you show the world who you are and what you can do.
Will it be your platform or the economy’s?
The judgment of others or just your self-awareness?
Sometimes you’re in the flow, sometimes you just get a hard blow

The system gets you, the stage becomes a medium
of production and reduction, you become the reaction to someone else’s action
And when the black suits ask will it work, you stammer guiltily it will not work
As if your failure is the cause of someone else’s failure
As if you have to star for their down-to-earth stories
Of profit motive, profit motive, profit margin, profit distribution and profit withdrawal
of your freedom on stage, an inside-out reversal of the world itself,
skinning you, poaching your skin, monetizing your soul
And – stop – motion – freeze – you – middle – in – a – sigh….

The world’s a maze, but the company so often a maze with concrete columns,
a disaster for those who love courtyards, where greenery forgives freedom,
an agony for those who wish to wander freely past all the options that give themselves freely.
Not a hint of creativity is here. Just tighten that nut. And again.
This is our method. Again and again the same commandments. From anode to cathode.
This is how our hierarchical structure works. This was your lunch hour. The toilet is in THAT barn.
We don’t like fire, we don’t like pure.
The only shine we want is the sweat of thy face.
The only shine we enjoy radiates from the paintwork of our automobiles.
Because you do what we want, how we want it, when we want it, where we want it
Slow – down – stop – motion – middle – in – flight….

We go back to wandering in the twists and turns of our minds,
the shortcuts to unexpected outcomes that bewildered and
bashfully gazing at yourself in the mirror of your soul. We are going to remodel the tent.
This project is drowning in too many hours. No, the lees must settle first.
This provides too little return. No, it is you who constantly ment and transmits.
We want a straight channel from A to B. No, we prefer to go straight.
We want dams to drain power. Our energy level must not slacken.
No, the flow goes its own way, from high to low, from fun to difficult, from pain
to denouement, from deceleration to acceleration, from B to K, from fa to la la la,
until the time comes when the wine of a golden year can be drunk
and there is a celebration in breadth, wider than the bandwidth of functionality and efficiency
uncork – that – bottle – stop – motion – bang – champagne – in – the – air….

Look, Alliander is a transformational house where other ideas zing full of homecoming
to transform is to do it all differently than others do it
To transform is to change is to meander along the multiplicity of energy,
the ever-branching river that goes upstream and reckons with the smallest point,
who is in everything and stirring everything on the stage of the world.
But how do we change? How do we meander away from the maze of efficiency,
the rigid rules, the cool categories, and meanest denominator of the bottom line?
How do we set course for a haven where people are safe, central, sacred again?


To meander is to dare. To change is to turf. You grab your skills by the lugs and lift them up.
To do things differently, start doing things differently without them.
The game has to start swinging first, sing your head full of lightness, hop skip and hup….
You are going to jump on the stage of the world again
Playing, full of play, like Spie with a green Fingerspitzengefühl
And playfully, all efficient contentless energy regains meaning

Because playing is enough
playing is greening
without gnawing remorse over taking without giving
To play is to come to your right, straight not bent, straight not wrong, but rightly
For play is a moral ambition that brings healing to the world
the world’s a stage
and we are enraged
and loose is the beast
Of the creativity that heals

We don’t want bullshit but rather a lot of spunk
We do not want a distortion of reality but meaning for reality
We do not want soured business but an ethic of welfare and giving
We do not want polished rhetoric but authentic dragging to the good
We want the in-between space that does not exist now
To spread the practice wings
and plotting plans that sometimes fail as well
and that’s okay, because you have to fail before you can reach the finish line

We are Gifted

2024 © Jos de Keijzer, Zekyr Texts

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