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.