The Game

What is “The Game”? It represents the innumerable seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years that we, as human beings, spend gathering knowledge.

Knowledge is very much like a gun. So long as others possess it, so must we possess it. Without it, we preserve our innocence, but at the expense of being unready for the challenges of living in society. As time passes, we will replace our animal instincts with more “refined” ways and means. Life loses its simplicity when we decide that the rest of the world’s problems will become our own. No longer do we live our own lives, but we watch others with rapt attention and form them into complex opinions.

To be sure, learning the ins and outs of one’s own existence is a monumental undertaking that requires every second of one’s life. We are given that time for a reason, and it is no more and no less than we need to live completely. Where, then, do we find the time to follow lives other than our own? The answer is quite simple, really: our time on Planet Earth is a finite allotment, and we have no source other than that time from which to draw. Though time is not enough to follow other lives, other hardships, other beliefs, yet we squander it thereupon.

And so it goes that, at a certain point in our development as human beings, we make a choice to sacrifice personal discovery for knowledge. Thereafter, we spend our days and nights racing to keep up with all the many developments in the lives of others. We console oursleves, as our spirits wither, that we are fulfilling our life’s meaning by focusing on the collective plights of humanity. Such is the flawed nature of charity that it believes self-sacrifice is the way to enlightenment. But it is not, and most surely do we lose ourselves in the process of becoming “well-read”, or “cultured”, or otherwise “educated”.  These practices are the rules of that very game that, until the end of our days, occupies us unerringly.  

We return home at night, to a feeling of emptiness. We feel our uncertainty mounting, and always there is the question, “who am I?” Little wonder that we feel profoundly incomplete even after we’ve spent the entirety of our days following news, as if it were a shadow skipping before us, always visible, but never graspable. Why should we not feel incomplete when we neglect ourselves so completely? Vast tracts of our being remain untouched. At long last, the sum total of what we think we know about others, crowds out what we know about ourselves. It quite literally dwarfs our own self-knowledge. And we are content to have it so. By the time we realize the depth of our entrenchment in the game, we are at a loss how to extricate ourselves.

Where does one begin, who means to disavow all knowledge and replace it with instinct? By trading in a car? By deserting one’s home? By emptying one’s life savings?  The task is daunting in the extreme. We must make our return to no less than our first moments on Earth. Then was the time before we learned the conventions of civilized living. It seems too late to go so far back in search of the things we knew when we were born. No sooner had we opened our eyes, than the eyes staring back began teaching us the ways of the world. Had we kept our eyes closed, ours would have been a knowledge rather of Nature than of society. 

I have never learned in a book, what I cannot know from looking in my own backyard. The truth of life exists in all things, great and small. It is no more in the greatness of Mount Everest than in the delicate beauty of a dandelion. Nor will learning about the struggles of a person halfway across the world teach us more than self-reflection and the experience of living first-hand.

There, indeed, is a difference between ourselves and the animal nature we’ve so resolutely divorced. If we are to evolve, we must turn our gaze inward, and let go the struggles of the world beyond. We haven’t the time to waste, and even if we did, learning the published facts of another life will never truly illuminate that life. So much is left between the lines. One’s own life is the only life truly knowable, so we must stop neglecting ourselves. We will find that the better place we so seek through charity, does not exist outside, but inside.

Starvation

Across the street, I saw him waiting to cross. He seemed hardy, then. He wore a black overcoat, and his pants were black. I saw his face, the eyes, the mouth. I thought, then, of charcoal that smudges on white pages. I thought, then, of mistakes, and of erasers. 

Something, as he stood there, made him seem tall. But I looked at his shoulders, and at the shoulders of the others, and I saw that he was not. I saw, now, his hands, which hung at his sides, and they were motionless, utterly motionless. I thought of a tire swing in the bleak mid-winter, years later. I thought of the summer and of the children that rode.

Now, the light changed, and the crowd moved as one. His steps were long and rickety. He moved like a project of bits and pieces. Surely a thread must hold him together. But now, he stood before me, and I watched his face. It was an accident of a face. The smudges, I saw, were true, and the paper-white skin, true.

I remember when we were boys. We played at finding secret doors. When Fall shook the leaves from the trees high above, they made mountains all over. And through them, we strode, like giants from far away lands. We fell far, and when our bodies crashed upon the earth, the leaves rained down and caught in our hair. Then Autumn faded, and the leaves crunched like newborns’ shells. We made music through the woods, like crackling and crunching.

And soon came the snow, and the cold. We laughed at the Earth, for the Earth covered herself in a cold blanket. We walked carefully, for we dared not waken her. She must rest, for all those days we kept her awake with crunching. But sometimes, we went to the edge of her bed, where her blankets were thin, and we rolled them up.

I remember our cheeks when we were young. They were red. And didn’t they burn? 

I remember petting your hair, and you let me.