SOME people say life gets easier if you don't take it too seriously, if you treat it as a game that you absolutely must play because you had no say in the matter – nobody asked to be born, after all. It goes without saying that when it comes to the important stuff such as career, relationships, family life and so on, we'd much prefer to win most (if not all) of the time rather than lose. It feels good to win, and it sucks to lose.
For many people, myself included, the very thought of losing at a thing is so painful that all it takes is one failed attempt to make them give up completely and never consider the matter in question ever again. Or as George Michael put it, “Once bitten, and twice shy.” Thankfully for mankind, there are some people in history who despite having failed time and again kept pushing anyway, and got the results they wanted in the end. For me, George Washington and Michael Jordan come to mind: the former because in the end it was dogged persistence and a staunch refusal to surrender and not clever strategies that won America's independence from the British Empire, and the latter because he completely understood the law of averages despite not being a statistician. Sure, M.J. missed a great number of the shots he made during his entire basketball career, but he knew for a fact that the more shots he made, the more chances he'd have at actually scoring.
“In the end, it's all just a numbers game!” I recall one of my elders telling me one evening when the conversation over tequila suddenly turned to matters of romance (as they often do here in this country).
“You mean cellphone numbers?” I asked him naively. I was a lot younger then, you see.
“Well yes, there's that... But what I actually meant was you'd have more chances of landing yourself a relationship if you asked several girls out at a time instead of focusing all of your efforts on just one girl who'd probably turn you down outright because she could smell your desperation from a mile away.”
“So I shouldn't take this whole courtship thing too seriously then, that's what you're saying?”
“You're learning, boy,” he said as he took another shot of tequila.
While many, many people think love is all that matters, in truth it isn't the whole story – life is. Granted, if you trace the history of the two words “love” and “life” all the way back to their Germanic roots, you'll find that they sound an awful lot alike, just like the old, old words for “think” and “thank.” If you ask me, it's no accident that those words are just the way they are – those concepts must have a lot to do with each other, much more than we think. The ancients were tremendously wiser, much more than we give them credit for.
If that is the case – and I can't help but conclude that indeed it is – then the same principles apply. To win at the game of life, or at least to get to the point where you've fulfilled the conditions for your personal definition of success, you have to keep playing. Persist. Make mistakes, but learn from them.
And in my case, as a writer, it's to accept that while each new piece I write may not be a masterpiece for the ages, each new piece I write will at least take me a tiny bit closer to that goal. I just need to keep at it without letting up. (That said, my writer's block has been finally cured.)
After all, life and everything in it is just a game. So let's keep playing and hopefully we'll all have fun while we're at it.