As a child (okay, as an adult as well) I loved playing The Game of Life. I had it memorized where you'd end up on the board from any given place to according to anything you rolled (or spun, since our game used a spinner to tell you how many spaces you were moving). I even have the computer game version of it and spent a lot of time playing that as well. Joe (my friend from the last post) will testify about my love of this game from the day we spent an entire afternoon playing multiple games, both board and computer.
So I have no clue how it got into my head last night, but this whole speech, blog post, whatever, comes to me around midnight as I am exhausted and trying to get to sleep. And I had to get up and write it down before it drove me mad (because of course it had no intention of leaving me alone until I got it out). So here it is, and the scary thing is how much sense it makes coming from an exhausted mind.
The Game of Life is regular, planned out. You know that if you roll a six, you’re going to win a marathon or if you take the left fork you get a baby boy, while if you take the right, you get a new TV. You know to always buy insurance, early and a lot of it. You know that if you go to college, you get a good job
Real life doesn’t work that way. You don’t know if you’ve rolled a three and you’re on your way to a promotion or if you rolled a ten and are getting a ticket on top of breaking your leg. You don’t know if insurance will actually pay off or if you’re just giving your money away every month. You don’t know if spending $40,000 on tuition is worth it in the long run.
But maybe that’s why life is more satisfying than the game. At the end of the game, sure you may have won, but really you’ve just won the satisfaction of beating the other players at a game that is half chance.
In real life at the end, if you’ve played a good game, you have love or success to sustain you. You look back on your life and maybe you see the mistakes, the blind rolls, but you also see where fortune shined and you got more blessings that could ever come from a simple game. Any gambler knows, the more you risk, the more you win. And the more you put into life, the more you actually live it, the fuller your life feels, the more reward you reap. Maybe it’s not the reward you thought or planned for, but maybe it’s better than what you wanted. So, you want a turn?
I love this! nuff said :)
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ReplyDeleteI always found the Game of Life really boring because it seemed to me that everyone followed the same path. You know?
ReplyDeleteFamily, House, Career, END! And real life is never that tedious or predictable--there's no pain, heartbreak, hate, death, or true variation in The Game of Life. No one helps out at a charity or joins a new church after losing their original faith, no one has a falling out with their emotionally abusive family (because those don't exist in TGoL), nothing truly 'bad' happens.
Nothing of any real substance but (what seems to me) a bunch of people just 'going through the motions' of life instead of the truth of what life really is. Which, to me, is the emotions we all feel and the struggles we have to go through to get where we are now. To grow as people we have to experience pain and trials to get to become who we are today. The people in The Game of Life never have that--they are completely and entirely one dimensional.
Sorry for the TL; DR. What a great post though! It really made me think on this for a couple days. :)
Wow, those are some great comments Cortney. And you are totally right
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