Life Is a Game, But Don't Forget to Play

I have always liked games.

Maybe that is because games make life seem a little easier to understand.

There are rules.

There is usually a goal.

There are ways of getting there.

And, if you are lucky, there are other people sitting around the table or standing on the field with you.

Life, unfortunately, doesn't come with quite such a useful instruction manual.

Bernard Suits, the philosopher who wrote The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, spent a great deal of time thinking about games. His definition is complicated enough to make you wish you were playing Scrabble instead, but his central idea is wonderfully simple.

A game has a goal. It has rules. It has ways of achieving the goal. And, most importantly, we agree to accept the rules even when they make achieving the goal harder.

Think about golf.

The object is to get the ball into the hole.

If that were the only thing that mattered, I could walk up to the green, pick up the ball and put it in the cup.At times I may have done that just to end the hole, bujt don't tell anyone.

Goal accomplished.

Except it wouldn't be golf.

Golf is golf because we agree to make it difficult.

We stand on a tee hundreds of yards from the hole and attempt to hit a tiny ball with a club. We then chase it around the course, occasionally finding water, sand, trees and other places where golf balls go to disappear.

We voluntarily accept all those unnecessary obstacles.

That is what makes it a game.

Suits calls this attitude toward the rules the "lusory attitude."

In plain English, we agree to play by the rules because we want to play the game.

And that got me thinking.

Maybe life works the same way.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to make life easier.

We want fewer obstacles.

Fewer disappointments.

Fewer complications.

Fewer things going wrong.

But without obstacles, there is no game.

The difficulty is part of what gives the game meaning.

A chess player doesn't complain that the opponent is making things difficult. That's the point.

A golfer doesn't object to the fact that the hole is too far away. That's the point.

A Scrabble player doesn't complain that the letters are inconvenient. That's the point.

Perhaps life is much the same.

The obstacles are not always interruptions to the story.

Sometimes they are the story.

There is another important distinction in Suits' thinking. There are people who participate in a game without really playing it properly.

The trifler recognizes the rules but ignores the goal.

The cheat recognizes the goal but ignores the rules.

And the spoilsport recognizes neither.

We have all met them.

The person who changes the rules when they start losing.

The person who will do anything to win.

The person who doesn't care whether anyone else is having a good time.

And then there is the true player.

The true player understands both the goal and the rules.

But here is the part I find most interesting: the reward is not simply winning.

The reward is playing.

That may be one of the most useful ideas we can carry into retirement.

We have spent much of our lives being measured by outcomes.

Grades.

Promotions.

Paycheques.

Titles.

Houses.

Savings.

Awards.

Achievements.

We became very good at keeping score.

Then one day retirement arrives and many of the old scorecards disappear.

There is no boss waiting to tell you that you had a productive Tuesday.

There is no annual performance review.

Nobody gives you a promotion because you finally learned how to make sourdough bread.

You have to create a new definition of success.

Perhaps that definition is less about winning and more about playing well.

Did you help somebody today?

Did you learn something?

Did you laugh?

Did you spend time with someone you care about?

Did you try something you had never tried before?

Did you make somebody else's day a little better?

Did you get out of the house and into the world?

Did you enjoy the game?

I think this is why games have stayed with me.

They remind us that life isn't simply about reaching the final score.

It is about what happens between the opening whistle and the final one.

The conversations.

The surprises.

The mistakes.

The comebacks.

The people we meet.

The stories we collect.

The occasions when we thought we had lost but discovered another opportunity.

When I was young, I thought I played games because they were fun.

Now I suspect I played them because they were teaching me how to live.

Softball taught me to recover from an error.

Football taught me to keep moving.

Scrabble taught me to make the best of what I was given.

Checkers taught me to anticipate.

Chess taught me patience.

And all of them taught me that you cannot play alone.

Life is a game, but it is not a game we play simply to win.

We play because we are alive.

We play because there are people beside us.

We play because the rules give shape to the experience.

We play because obstacles make the journey interesting.

And, eventually, we learn that the greatest prize isn't the trophy sitting at the end of the game.

It is the game itself.

So, if you are retired, don't ask yourself only, "What have I accomplished?"

Ask a different question.

"What game am I playing now?"

And then, whatever your answer, make sure you are actually playing.

The Grasshopper, the Ant and the Trouble with Tomorrow

There is an old story about a grasshopper and an ant.

You probably know it, and told it to your children  and grandchildren, today I want to take a slightly different look at the fable.

All summer long, the grasshopper sings, dances and enjoys himself while the ant works away, storing food for the winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper discovers that dancing doesn't put food on the table.

So, he goes to the ant for help.

The ant refuses.

The traditional moral is pretty straightforward: work hard, prepare for the future and don't expect somebody else to rescue you when the consequences of your choices arrive.

There is some wisdom in that.

I have spent enough years around seniors to know that preparing for the future matters. Saving money matters. Looking after your health matters. Building friendships matters. Having somewhere to live matters. Thinking about what you will do when you retire matters.

But I have always been troubled by the simple version of this story.

It seems to suggest that we have to choose.

Are you an ant or a grasshopper?

Do you work or do you play?

Do you prepare for tomorrow or enjoy today?

Perhaps the answer is: neither.

Or, more accurately, both.

The philosopher Bernard Suits took the Grasshopper story and turned it upside down. In his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, he uses the grasshopper to challenge the idea that work is automatically more valuable than play.

The argument is surprisingly uncomfortable.

We spend much of our lives working so that we can eventually have the freedom to do something else. We save money so that one day we can retire. We work to create leisure.

In other words, the ant may be working so that he can eventually become a grasshopper.

And there is something worth thinking about here, particularly for those of us who have entered retirement.

For years we were told to prepare for retirement.

Save.

Invest.

Pay off the mortgage.

Build a pension.

Look after your health.

Plan ahead.

All good advice.

But then retirement arrives and we discover that preparing for retirement is different from knowing how to live it.

You can spend forty years preparing for Saturday and then discover you don't know what to do when Saturday finally arrives.

I have met people who were incredibly successful at being ants. They worked hard, saved carefully and did everything they were told they should do.

Then they retired.

And they discovered that nobody had taught them how to be a grasshopper.

That is where games and play become important.

Play is not simply the opposite of work. Play is one of the ways we make sense of ourselves.

Think about a group of seniors sitting around a table playing cards. There may be laughter, teasing, arguments about the rules and somebody insisting that everyone else is cheating.

It looks like a game.

But something much more important is happening.

People are talking.

They are remembering.

They are competing.

They are laughing.

They are belonging.

The game has become a reason to be together.

That is why I worry when we treat play as something frivolous, something we should have grown out of when we became adults.

We haven't.

We still need it.

Perhaps especially as we grow older.

The grasshopper and the ant are not enemies. They are two parts of a balanced life.

The ant reminds us that tomorrow matters.

The grasshopper reminds us that today matters.

The ant says, "Put something aside."

The grasshopper says, "Don't put everything aside."

The ant says, "Think about winter."

The grasshopper says, "It is summer now."

Wisdom may be knowing when to listen to each of them.

There is another lesson hidden in the story.

We should be careful about judging people whose lives look different from ours.

The grasshopper may be irresponsible. Or perhaps he understands something the ant has forgotten.

The ant may be responsible. Or perhaps she is so busy preparing for tomorrow that she has forgotten to live today.

Most of us are somewhere in between.

We work. We save. We plan.

And we also dance, play cards, read books, go fishing, play golf, visit friends, listen to music and tell stories.

That is not a failure of discipline.

That is life.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that the goal isn't to become a perfect ant or a perfect grasshopper.

It is to know when to work, when to prepare and when to put down the tools and enjoy the afternoon.

Winter will come.

It always does.

But that is precisely why we should appreciate summer.

The lesson isn't simply to prepare for winter.

It is to make sure that, while preparing for winter, we don't miss the summer.

The Games That Taught Me How to Live

 In 1969 a singer named Joe  South had a hit song called “The Games People Play” I heard it on the radio, and it got me thinking about the games I used to play.

When I was young, I played a lot of games.

I played softball and football. I played Scrabble, checkers and chess. Some were games of speed and strength. Others required patience, strategy and the ability to sit quietly and think while your opponent was trying to figure out what you were thinking.

I played most of them pretty well.

Looking back, I realize that I was learning much more than how to hit a ball, throw a pass or put the right letter on a triple-word score. I was learning how to deal with life. That may sound like a stretch, but think about what happens when you play a game.

You don't always win.

Sometimes the ball takes a bad bounce. Sometimes your opponent makes a move you didn't expect. Sometimes you make a spectacularly stupid decision and spend the next few minutes wondering what on earth you were thinking.

And then you have a choice.

You can complain about the bounce, blame the umpire, argue with your opponent or simply walk away.

Or you can get on with the game.

Life has a habit of doing much the same thing.

We make our plans. We think we know where we are going. Then something happens. A job disappears. A marriage ends. Someone we love becomes ill. A friend dies. Retirement arrives and suddenly the identity we carried for forty years is no longer part of our daily routine.

The ball takes a bad bounce.

What matters then is not that the bounce was unfair. Sometimes it was. What matters is what we do with the next play.

I think that is one of the great gifts of games. They give us a safe place to practise being human.

Softball taught me that you can't spend the whole game worrying about the last error. Football taught me that sometimes you have to move forward while people are trying to stop you, and that you will have people to help you move forward. Scrabble taught me that a small advantage can become a big one if you know how to use it. Checkers taught me to think ahead. Chess taught me that every move has consequences, and that sometimes the move you make today won't reveal its importance until much later.

Those lessons have stayed with me.

We are shaped by what happens to us, including the difficult things. The poet and philosopher David Whyte has written about how suffering can become part of the making of a person. I like the idea that the things that harrow us can also help us mature.

Even the word "harrow" has an interesting history. It is connected to the idea of preparing the soil. Before a field can produce a harvest, the earth must be broken up and worked.

Perhaps people are not so different.

Life occasionally breaks up the comfortable soil of our existence. We experience loss, disappointment, failure and uncertainty. None of us would volunteer for most of these experiences. Yet somehow, over time, we can use them to grow.

That doesn't mean suffering is good. It isn't.

It means we have the remarkable human ability to decide what we will do with what has happened to us.

And perhaps that is where hope enters the picture.

Hope is a strange thing. We continue to hope even when experience tells us that things may not work out. We plant gardens knowing winter will come. We make plans knowing they may change. We fall in love knowing that one day someone will have to say goodbye.

John Steinbeck described hope as a kind of tragic miracle of consciousness. It is miraculous because we continue to imagine what might be possible, and tragic because the world doesn't always cooperate with our hopes.

But we keep playing.

That may be one of the defining characteristics of being human.

We lose a game and come back tomorrow.

We fail and try again.

We grieve and eventually discover that we can laugh again.

We retire and discover that although one chapter has ended, there are still pages left to write.

The games of my childhood didn't prepare me for every twist and turn of life. Nothing could.

But they taught me something important: you cannot control everything that happens during the game. You can control how you respond to it.

Sometimes you win.

Sometimes you lose.

Sometimes you make a brilliant move. Sometimes you wonder what possessed you.

But the game continues.

And perhaps the real lesson of all those games is this:

Don't spend your life standing on the sidelines complaining about the score.

Get back in the game.

Music Has a Way of Sneaking Past Dementia

 There is something almost magical about music.

We don't fully understand why, but time and again researchers have found that music can reach people living with dementia in ways that conversation often can't. A familiar song can calm anxiety, lift a person's mood, reduce agitation, and, for a few precious moments, reconnect them with the people they love.

That's one of the reasons we offer our monthly Music Café for caregivers and people living with dementia. We've seen the smiles, the tapping feet, the singing, and sometimes even the conversations that follow a favourite song.

The research backs up what families have been noticing for years. Study after study has shown that music is one of the most effective non-drug approaches for reducing agitation and distress in people living with dementia. Other research has found that listening to personally meaningful music can stimulate parts of the brain that remain relatively untouched by Alzheimer's disease.

The key isn't just any music.

It's their music.

Researchers at the University of Utah found that songs connected to important life events light up parts of the brain that hold on the longest. One researcher described music as "an anchor" that helps ground a person back in their world. Another study found that nursing home residents who listened to personalized playlists often needed fewer antipsychotic medications.

Think about the music that mattered when your loved one was between the ages of 10 and 25. Those are often the songs that stay with us for life.

Creating a playlist doesn't take much time, and it could become one of the greatest gifts you give someone. Build it free. Any streaming app, 20 to 30 songs. Or try m4dradio.com, ( a Britishi free 24/7 station sorted by birth decade). Incredible resources right there.

Start by figuring out the years that shaped their musical memories. If they were born in 1946, look for songs from about 1956 to 1971.

Then become a musical detective. Ask brothers, sisters, old friends, or family members about wedding songs, favourite singers, church hymns, dances, or music that was always playing in the house. You can even ask simple questions like, "Were you an Elvis fan or did you prefer Sinatra?" You may be surprised by the smile that appears.

Build a playlist with 20 or 30 songs using your favourite streaming service, or explore one of the many free online stations that play music by decade.

When it's time to listen, choose a quiet moment. Comfortable headphones often work well, but speakers are fine if they're preferred. Watch for a tapping foot, a smile, or someone quietly singing along.

And here's one little suggestion that can make a big difference.

Instead of asking, "Do you remember this song?" simply ask, "Do you like this one?" There's no memory test to pass. Just enjoy the moment together.

This isn't a cure. The door may only open for a few minutes. But those minutes can be priceless.

A friend once told me that the song that always brought him back was "Viva Las Vegas." People joke that Elvis has left the building, but for three wonderful minutes, Elvis brought my friend right back into it.

The next time you visit someone living with dementia, don't worry about finding the perfect words.

Bring the music instead.

You may discover that the song says everything that needs to be said, except "Two cell towers got married. The ceremony wasn’t great, but the reception was perfect."