What if, just for a moment, we imagined life as a game?
Not a competition in which somebody must win and somebody else must lose. Nor a game in which every event has been arranged in advance, with hidden rules we are supposed to discover.
Simply a way of looking at the experience of being alive.
It is an idea I explored in my earlier writing, and one I still find interesting, although my understanding of it has changed over the years.
Most games involve entering a world with possibilities and limitations.
We make choices. We discover things. We encounter circumstances we hadn't anticipated. Sometimes we succeed in doing what we intended, and sometimes the entire direction changes.
We may begin with a clear objective, only to discover that what interested us most was something we hadn't considered at the beginning.
Life can feel rather like that.
We form ideas about how things should unfold.
We imagine where we will live, what we will become, what we might achieve, and the kind of life we hope to create.
Then we begin living it.
Other people arrive with their own wishes and choices. Circumstances change. Opportunities appear and disappear. Our interests develop. What once seemed essential may eventually seem unimportant.
And sometimes, what matters most to us emerges from something we never set out to pursue.
Of course, the comparison has its limits.
A game usually has agreed rules, and the possibility of walking away. Life offers neither in quite the same way.
People are born into very different circumstances. Some face difficulties and losses that cannot reasonably be described as challenges chosen for their benefit.
I would never want the metaphor to suggest that suffering is deserved, that hardship is a test we have somehow requested, or that everything happens according to a concealed plan.
There is no need to make those claims for the idea to be interesting.
What appeals to me is something simpler.
We learn about ourselves through participation.
We may think we know how we would respond to a particular situation, but thinking about an experience and actually living through it are not the same thing.
We may imagine ourselves patient, courageous, generous, cautious or independent.
Then life presents circumstances in which those descriptions are no longer merely ideas.
We discover something about the way we respond.
Sometimes we like what we discover. Sometimes we don't.
And sometimes we realise that the person we thought we were is not quite the person we are becoming.
That is not necessarily a failure.
It may simply be part of being human.
There is also something interesting about the roles we take on.
We can become so accustomed to a role that we begin to mistake it for the whole of who we are.
A profession. A position. A responsibility. A reputation. A particular way of being known by others.
These things can matter enormously, and there is nothing wrong with caring about them.
But roles can change.
What happens to our understanding of ourselves when one of them is no longer there?
Do we become less of a person, or have we simply lost one of the ways through which we recognised ourselves?
I don't have a final answer.
What interests me is the possibility that we are continually discovering aspects of ourselves through the lives we lead.
Not uncovering a predetermined identity hidden somewhere inside us, but noticing how our understanding changes as we encounter new experiences.
Perhaps the game metaphor is useful only for as long as it helps us see something.
We can put it aside whenever it stops being helpful.
After all, life is not obliged to fit our comparisons.
But I still enjoy the question.
If we stopped measuring our lives solely by what we had achieved, acquired, or successfully completed, what else might we notice about the experience of living?
The relationships. The curiosity. The unexpected discoveries. The changing sense of who we are.
Perhaps even the simple pleasure of taking part.
Not because there is a prize waiting at the end.
But because, while we are here, there is a life to experience.