Life is a Game

     “Life is a Game” .... Such a happy, safe, good-feeling statement.  BUT, on the objective side... "Life is a Game" is the short story version of a much greater reality.  Each game can be won or lost on a single play.  In life we play many games a day.  So what ... if we lose a single game?  There are many more games left to be played.  The problem of taking an, "only a game," attitude too nonchalantly is that one pivotal loss can change the course of a life just as brutally as it can cost a championship.  A single pivotal error in a single game can lose the pivotal game.  A reasonable person will quickly point out that in any game there are many good plays: why focus on a single error?  As we participate in any endeavor, average-to-good efforts are the norm.  It is the outlier that usually determines any outcome.  Machiavelli says that to be successful, you must work very hard AND have a generous helping of good fortune.  Gary Player once said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."  The preceding statements are quite true.  Another brilliant person stated that an error is not a mistake until you choose not to correct the error. 

     "Life is a Game" is the underlying principle of the rise and fall of dynasties and societies.  It is a human tendency to relax once you have become successful.  It is also human nature to lose sight of the factors that actually created a specific success.   After six months in a new marriage, my sister-in-law asked her new husband, Mark, why he had ceased to dote on her every whim.  He, way too truthfully replied, "Darling...trapping season is over!"  This husbandly/wifely behavior is representative of the down side of the Bell Curve.  Mark would not have won fair maiden to begin with, without a "trapping season" effort.  The downside complacent efforts affect all of us as we pass through the life we live, uncaring or unaware.  Life, love and success are transitory.  The existence of “transitory” is nature’s sense of balance and nature's way of determining who is truly worthy of the championship.

     I have enjoyed becoming intellectually involved in tracking baseball over the last couple of years.  Baseball games (all life games) are highly cerebral activities.  Recently I watched a game where a highly successful team had a play where one of the players was laughing and monkeying around.  The balance between being relaxed and rightly focused is razor thin.   The team that was monkeying around, lost the next several games.  Monkeying around is merely an underlying warning symptom that represents a lack of respect for life's harsh judge.  In the losing games, the team lost these games because they failed to make a few plays that they could have made if they had been intently focused and respectful of the laws of life's game. 
 

    Success/confidence, or lack thereof in any game, has a dramatic influence over how we act and react in future games.  The psychology of loss far overpowers the positive mental energy of success.  In other words; one "oh shit" wipes out all the "atta-boys."  Self-doubt is established with a loss.  Only an arrogant sense of normalcy is felt with a win.  Re-establishing confidence after a loss takes much more energy, AND good fortune, than the energy required for the original success.  The original success did not have the burden of failure to overcome.  Original success is culminated by, everything to gain, nothing to lose.   Original success is cloaked in a relaxed sense of respect, enjoyment, wonder and untold hours of hard work.