We should not take it too seriously: it is only our life, a dance full of stumbles, a fury full of caresses, a sublime game that cannot be lost.
If it is true that our entire social, cultural and artistic construct arises in the first instance as play (Huizinga), then we may imagine that playing and living are one and the same.
Life as the game of knowing nothing - where we come from and where we are going - an open world, open outcome game. If so, playing should be the first commandment, and Italy should be a republic founded on the courage to play at life.
In Toy Story 2, Stinky Pete is an elderly prospector doll who has never been taken out of his original box. He has never lived, and he sees his display in a Tokyo museum as the only possible redemption for his existence.
If we do not play our life, no one will be able to enjoy it, not even later on - however well preserved, however unused.
Play and the toy are a metaphor for our power over the world around us, the memory of our being omnipotent and the creators of the future awaiting us.
In today's Western turbo-capitalism, play becomes something else: scientific play and gambling. The kraken of the free market swallows this aspect of our lives too, along with all the others. If we take away from play the occasional possibility of overstepping the rules, play ceases to be play: football, for instance, by becoming scientific gives up its own nature as game and epic, to become an instrument of investment and power for the rich, as well as a religion for the poor.

Life is a game independent of reason,
it crosses the physical limits of reality to flow into the spirit.
Life is a free game, and art is a toy
that abandons its role as fetish
to return to its playful and sacred nature,
because only "serious" play (the play played by children)
can raise us to those heights of beauty and holiness
that are closed to reason.

The anconette are caskets of our past play, a perpetual reminder of our having been children, of our having built ourselves around that child who still dwells within us. They are caskets of memories, windows in space and time able to stop time at one precise instant; they are boxes of time past, immortal icons, vows to profane deities, little flags on the timeline, ex-votos, holding images, music, scents, words, whispers, suggestions and evocations of a time gone by.
Their sacredness lies in their being born closed, secret, hidden from everyone's eyes but our own. Their interior, gilded and lacquered, represents the heart, the child within us, the music and the sound of that breath of time in our life.
The anconette are strongboxes for the memories of the heart.

Picture yourself as a five-year-old child, and invite that child to be with you - that boy or girl who is still alive within you.
Thich Nhat Hanh

In the midst of the financial crisis, something happened in Greece that seems like a sign from the future. Some children discovered a large bundle of banknotes in a derelict house and put it to an entirely new use: they began to play with the notes and tear them up. These children in some way anticipate our future: the world lies in ruins. Amid these ruins we play – like those children – with banknotes and tear them apart. These Greek children profane money, capital, the new idol, by putting it to a wholly different use, that is, by playing with it. Profanation suddenly turns money, so fetishized today, into a toy.
Byung-Chul Han

In Plato's dialogue Nomoi (The Laws) it is said: […] man […] is only a plaything made by the gods, and indeed this is his finest part. Following from this conception, every man and every woman must live playing this game as well as they possibly can.
Plato