The Game Called Life

Previously published in the Coastal Illustrated, April 18, 2012

Life is hard. I just found out I am having another girl and no one seems too concerned that I am running out of room in my car.*  And it sure doesn’t help that I still haven’t paid off my student loans yet and now one of my pre-existing kids has decided she wants to go to med school after I paid ten thousand for a wedding reception so she could then elope with a struggling stand up comedienne that comes with an annual salary of five G’s, a double wide, and a flat screen TV.

This is the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night.

That’s why, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why my family likes to play Milton Bradley’s Game of Life right before bed.  It’s even getting to my nine year old.  She ended up paying so much money in back taxes she had one heck of a nightmare last night and had to spend the night wedged in our bed. 

But it got me thinking (as well as not sleeping.)  Is the Game called Life really a reasonable interpretation of the honest to goodness, real, breathing in and out, and putting one foot in front of the other thing it’s named after?

In some ways, yes, I think it is.   In life, just as in Life, it does seem more times than not, we close our eyes, spin the “metaphorical” wheel, and hope for the best.  Will we win the lottery, a TV game show, or five grand worth of free furniture?  No, probably not.  But see, there are all of these things out there we can’t control, like a recession, job loss, or medical bills, so we take three, five, ten steps forward-whatever we can get- and pray for the best.  It doesn’t seem fair.  But it’s all we can do.

Will we find a buried treasure or win the Nobel Peace prize?  Our odds are much better in the Game of Life than the real one, but in both, we have choices to prepare us for the “down the road” scenarios that will inevitably pop up.  Education, investments, spending wisely not frivolously, are all options for both that can better prepare us for life’s greater challenges.

But still, unforeseen circumstances happen all the time in the game and reality as well.  We might lose a hefty investment, have to take a pay cut due to no fault of our own, or maybe even be sued by one of your own family members.  All of these things happen in real life, but sometimes the responses seem to be the same as those thrown out around the game board: “It’s not my fault.  I can’t do anything about it.  It’s just life.”

Basically, suck it up….which are tough words to swallow.  So maybe this is where I think the two differ.  Real life is what happens when the rubber meets the road, when it’s no longer play practice, but the real deal.  And real life, unlike the game, should never be left up to chance.

When I was a freshman at UGA way back when, one of my favorite classes was a comparative lit class.  If I took one thing away from my studies that would shape the way I would look at life when I got out in the real world to live it, it would have to be reading Voltaire’s Candide. 

Voltaire was a French philosopher and writer during the seventeen hundreds, the period of Enlightenment, and is considered to one of the great thinkers behind the French and American Revolutions.  It’s true that our Founding Fathers were inspired by the very things we appreciate and practice now that were not available in Voltaire’s time that he advocated: freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

In his satire Candide, Voltaire rejects the notion that everything happens for the best in the “best of both possible worlds.”  In the author’s own world at the time, great atrocities were dismissed by saying “it’s God’s will” or “fate” and no one could do anything about it except for smile and be optimistic it will all work out in the end.  What he concludes still sticks with me today, that in the end, like Candide, we must all “cultivate our garden” and not leave our lives up to chance.  In fact, we must all try and control our own destinies through hard work and persistence.  If you plant a seed and tend to it, it will grow.  Look at the seed Voltaire planted in his day and how we are all reaping its reward today over 250 years later.

For me, when life gets hard I think about cultivating my garden and about how impossible things can become possible.  No matter how many times I spin the wheel and how many spaces I more forward, it will always be up to me to figure out a way to get on down the road. 

My girl’s have taught me a lot while playing the Game of Life and our subsequent discussions of it before bed.  Whenever the Life tiled road diverges and you have a choice to take the risky path or the safe one, they tell me to take the risky one every time.  Some people think a safe path might be better they tell me, but it slows you down getting where you want to go every time.

For me, I think I’ll teach my girls something in return.   I am going to pick out a piece of earth in our back yard.  We can plant tomato seeds and fertilize and water them.

And see what grows.

   

*Writer's Note: No.  I am NOT pregnant! No baby on the way but thanks for all the well-wishes after this story came out in paper a few weeks ago!  This momma already has more than she can handle!