If Life is a Game – How Will YOU Play?
Last weekend it rained and rained. We were all a little snuffly, cold and listless. So we dragged out the cards and board games and taught the children to play. And in the process they taught us some valuable life lessons. On a rainy Sunday afternoon.
We started with a game of Snap. The cards were tumbling out of our hands in a fast haze of colour and anticipation, Snap! Snap! Snap! Our daughter, five years old, was quick. She soon had a large pile of cards amassed in her hands. More than she could manage. “Gimme some?” pleaded her 3 year old brother, not really playing, but throwing cards on the pile and shouting “snap!” every three seconds. She looked up from her hoardings, and surveyed his hands, then mine, then her dads. Seeing we had only one or two cards each, her look of maniacal glee at winning slowly softened. She said “You can all have some, here you go” and proceeded to share her stash. Her father and I protested, “No it’s OK you keep them; you earned them.” And then she said, “No, we all did, it’s everybody’s cards and I don’t need them all anyway. If I take everything we won’t be able to play anymore.”
BAM! Life lesson No. 1 from a five year old: Only a few of us enjoy the abundance of what many have produced. How can that be fair? To move forward in this way has payoffs no doubt, but at what cost? By leaving others behind? In a world where mothers dig holes in the ground to place their children at night to keep them warm in the absence of blankets and clothes, a few of us hold too much. Open your closet. Am I right?
We moved on to playing Monopoly, our abridged version seeing as there were two players who didn’t know what rent meant. Understandably we were soon in a mess, with a five year old stuck despondently in jail and a three year old who’d lost the entire bank’s money down his pants. “We will have to find another way,” said their dad. “This isn’t working. They’re too young. They don’t understand ….and we don’t have any money anyway….”
BAM! Life lesson No. 2 as taught by children to their parents: In an economically driven world, where money is currency, many people lack the currency to play. They don’t have the knowledge and they don’t have the money. Without the knowledge that comes with education, they don’t even get to proceed to Go; they simply don’t get to play. For those of us who know better, got an education, earned some money, we have the power to say “this is not working, we will have to find another way.” Like a father looking at his children, feeling their distress at being left out, we have to lift our gaze to see our wider family, see their distress, and find another way to play.
This weekend my children taught me how the power of one can serve the collective good. What my daughter gave to us in our game of Snap, in her small five year old way, was freedom. She released us from not having enough by sharing what she had acquired, and in that gesture we got given the freedom to play. Together we learnt the lesson of creating a playing field where everyone gets to play. And we learned that we have the power to create it. It’s up to us. So if games are like life, is life a game? If so, how will you play?
Prepared and © by Mihiri Udabage, Generation Wonder (June 2008) for Soul Economy.
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