Part B: “The Playing Board”
Chapter 4: This obstacle course
Dear Mr Fantasy, play us a tune.
Something to make us happy.
Dear Mr Fantasy
Steve Winwood (Traffic)
I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but sometimes life can be complicated and frustrating. It feels like there are all these problems and hassles that soak up our time and energy, and prevent us from getting to work on the things we’d planned to. The whole Thursday side of the Tuesday-Thursday paradox is probably caused by this effect to some extent.
I used to find it very irritating to be confronted by a continuously refreshing bunch of problems that stood in the way of my progress. Then, at a conference a few years ago, I saw a presentation (by Alex Malley I think it was) where he talked about exactly this experience, and an epiphany he had had. What he said he realised was that these problems were not in fact getting in the way of what he did – solving these problems was what he did. Not only that, but getting better at problem solving didn’t reduce the number of problems like you think it will, but instead more and more problems became his responsibility to solve because he was promoted and successful.
Well, sometimes an epiphany shared really is an epiphany shared. This insight was precisely what I was missing at that time. I realised in that moment I was never going to have a clear run at the big, creative things that I thought were my main work. Instead, those distant objectives were just things I could work on when I occasionally managed to reduce the immediate problems down to a manageable level. With this new knowledge, I could get on with solving problems with a clear conscience, and keep my big, creative, existential objectives firmly on my to do list (for the day after Thursday – Wednesday!).
A different day I was talking to a friend about how some people solved problems for them, and how some people were problems – and I had a sudden vision of life as a kind of board game. Off in the distance, like the 100th square in a game of snakes and ladders, were the things we aspired to. In front of us, blocking our way and generally filling the gap from here to there, are all the obstacles we have to pass to get to them.
Some of the obstacles are simple tasks that need just a little time or effort or money to defeat, pitiful specks of dust we can sweep up as we pass them by. Others are like speed humps, others are hurdles, some might be a wall, some might be lakes or clouds. Really, any sort of visual imagery is allowed (that’s one of the nice things about imagining your own virtual game!), but I do think that what sort of obstacle we visualise a problem as is important, because it has implications for how we are going to respond to it.
Our game then is to move through these obstacles towards our distant objectives. We can’t ignore the obstacles, because the game requires us to get past them. Some we might ‘delete’ by defeating them in hand to hand combat, some we might be able to take out of the game by giving them to other people. Other obstacles we bounce off, changing direction and seeking another path. Others we climb over, sneak around or find a way to just punch straight through (hence the importance of how we visualise them!).
The board isn’t just populated with obstacles though.
Sometimes we find places we want to spend some time, either to sit a few minutes and metaphorically get our breath back, others where we might want to stay a while. We might even find a place we want to stay forever, though my guess is that sooner or later the problems will start to seek us out in these good places, and that we need to get on the move again.
There are also other characters in this game, other players. What we do affects them – and what they do affects us. Some characters are like ‘mobile problems’, blocking pathways, invading our good places and preventing movement. Other characters are more like teammates – helping solve problems, showing us ways through the game, showing us secret good places on the board, and generally sharing our experience.
In this ever-changing playing board, we spend our time defeating problems, finding teammates, looking for a pathway towards our objectives. Ideally, we learn as we go to recognise catalysts and facilitators that mean we can more easily pass certain types of obstacles. The path of least resistance might not always lead towards our objectives though, and so we need to keep a close eye on where our path is going now – and where it is heading more generally.
One important thing is how we feel about doing it. If we get grumpy and dispirited, thinking that these obstacles shouldn’t be here and that we can only enjoy ourselves once we get to our objectives, then a lot of our lives will be grumpy and dispiriting. This sort of demeanour is not likely to make us or the people around us feel particularly good. If we look at all these things instead as a challenging, somewhat enjoyable game in themselves though, we not only get to enjoy those times when our objectives are within reach, but we can also enjoy the rest (majority?) of the time that we spend navigating the board.
As I’ll talk about in chapter 6, while being grumpy is almost always going to be a bad thing, being dissatisfied about the game is a different and not necessarily bad thing. My theory is that people who are dissatisfied with the status quo will probably travel further around the board in the time they have.
Regardless of how you choose to play the game, I think there are several key ideas here. The first is that we are making our way through some sort of an obstacle course towards some distant objective, so we need to accept there will almost always be a bunch of obstacles to be dealt with, and there is no need to be surprised or dismayed by them.
The second is that we need to bounce off those obstacles and find a pathway through them. Our path is partly constructed from our choices, partly by what obstacles we happen to encounter, and also by the ways we defeat obstacles and the actions of other characters in our game. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised or dismayed by the presence of these obstacles, and we should learn to use them to our advantage where possible, not just bashing mindlessly away against them as though eventually they will vanish.
Finally, we don’t have to be grumpy just because we are dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction can be constructive and give us energy, but grumpiness will just pointlessly use up energy and make it harder for us to find teammates or a successful pathway.
Everything in one place 