Life as Chess simul
Sunday, July 11, 2010 4 Comments »The below post was written a long time ago but I never posted it knowing that I had just blabbered something silly. But I don't know; I don't care any more (16 Apr 2011).
The opponents you face are not just people, but also a large number of other abstract entities - which may include such personal traits as anger, courage, happiness, honesty, selfishness and much more ill-defined ones such as managing-others'-perception-of-you. Yes, you are in a game of Chess with all of them in a Chess simul. Can you imagine that? You might ask - "Why should I make happiness my opponent?". My answer is - "Do you want to be defeated in life by Happiness, whatever that means? No? So you play along and down the line of opponents, you do play against Unhappiness as well because you do not want to be defeated by unhappiness either, again, whatever that means".
Throughout your life, you keep moving across the boards making one move after another against your opponents with largely one ultimate motive every single time - to win, to be successful, or at the very least - not to lose.
Posts
4 comments:
"Why should I make happiness my opponent?". My answer is - "Do you want to be defeated in life by Happiness -- True. Good one. Happiness has the potential to defeat you.
Nice.
Liked the 'whatever that means' in between.
The problem with life is that there is no clear end.
In a chess game, the end you are trying to achieve is to check-make the opponent's king. Its clear.
In life, there is no clear end whichever opponent you are against. That makes it lot harder.
That's why I have always disliked a game analogy to life. Clarity is the issue.
@haseeb
Agreed but somehow even without being perfectly clear, we still have some idea of whats good and whats bad at every level and that is what drives our decisions most of the time.
But analogy with chess game still makes sense. In chess, you have the ultimate goal of winning and you want to make the move that gets you closer to it but its not perfectly clear at every step if your move is towards success or not. Similarly with life.
when you believe in choice, then criticism for choices different than yours are to be accepted.. next time leave kids alone if you can't nurture a kid's depth of thought
Post a Comment