Life is the game of infinite choices. A field that you can wend your way through a billion times and still stumble across patches you’ve not seen before.
Every quick-running or slow-walking step alters your route through the field, through life. When you stop to smell the blooms of beauty, pause a while beneath the boughs of a tree or simply lift your head and eyes to the skies and smile, these experiences change who you are. They don’t change you but they affect your senses: you are born looking through eyes of pure clarity but with age comes fettered, foggy vision.
It’s not that the field is different. It just looks and feels different. The field itself changes very little, in ways that are predictable. The framework of existence brings periods of pestilence and death when the lush emerald greens of life all but vanish, but it also brings new births, explosions of new energy. There are always seasons of bountiful growth when the booming burst of life seems to oust even the most die-hard spectres of dark pasts.
In the space between there is balance. It is among and between the spurts of life and rubble of death that we walk. It is right here and now, where we breathe and live and smile and survive that we make decisions about how we live our life; how best to cross that field, one step at a time.
What path should I choose? Will I let divine covenant or the winds of fortune guide me, knowing that every step I make will alter my ultimate destination?
If it helps, there are no wrong moves and only one rule, one obligation: I must make it to the end. I must survive the infinite game of life. How well I survive is only limited by my zeal and imagination.
Live life. Enjoy, relish and savour its tumultuous twists and turns: it’s meant to be fun!
Abi
Jun 1, 2009
I have to go out. But I like where this went and shall comment intelligently later- if I am not hampered by zeal and imagination. Just wanted you to know I read it.
sebastian
Jun 1, 2009
I don’t think you can be hampered by zeal… Well, unless you become a zealot…
floreta
Jun 1, 2009
lovely writing.
nice metaphor too. beats the ‘road/path’… i like the idea of a field with no set path or choice but anything for you to explore.
Hezabelle
Jun 1, 2009
Agreed. I was talking a friend the other day about how people underestimate the importance of happiness. They try to convince themselves that what’s practical or logical is more important – future happiness. But they forget that being happy (not ALL the time but at least overall) is more important than money or savings or a comfort zone.
“It is among and between the spurts of life and rubble of death that we walk.” So poetic.
sebastian
Jun 1, 2009
Yay! I’m glad someone else likes the new metaphor. I was awfully tired of reading and hearing about some boring path with a beginning, an end, and not a whole lot you can do to change what happens in between.
sebastian
Jun 1, 2009
I’m not sure where the whole ‘future security’ thing comes from. Perhaps from war or times of abject poverty? Lives where you can’t really plan on living tomorrow, so you must plan for the future — you must be able to ‘put’ yourself somewhere happy in the future, so that you have something to fight for today.
We want to plan for something. It’s not a bad thing to have goals I think. We shouldn’t force every decision we make to fit into our view of how the world should be, though. You can just wander onwards and see where it takes you?
(And thanks, I was trying to be a little poetic… I’m glad some of it leaked out!)
Just Playing Pretend
Jun 2, 2009
Zeal is such a powerful word. I’m going to work on incorpurating it into my daily vocabulary. It’s also nice to think that their are no wrong moves. Especially on days when I feel like that is the only kind of move I make.