When I am seated doing pulls and pushes on the Cardio-Glide apparatus that Gabe happily dragged home from an apartment cleanout in his former job working for a property manager a few years back, I face the basement board game shelf. Recently, I noticed the interesting names of the games collected there:
- Boggle
- Aggravation
- Risk
- Trouble
- Jeopardy
- Outburst
- Snail’s Pace Race
- Trivial Pursuit
Prompted by that visual display, for today’s post, I offer a few random thoughts which seem to parallel the “sometimes” of life:
- In Boggle, the game is different every time you play it–how you shake the cube with the individual letters in it will determine the words that can be made. And, the longer you look for letter combinations that make words, the more you see. But time eventually runs out.
- The thing that makes Aggravation so aggravating is the very thing that keeps you in the game. Sometimes you get knocked back to square one (or home base) and have to start over. Sometimes you don’t get the exact number of moves that let you get your marbles home free and clear And sometimes, your move, dictated not by choice but by the roll of the dice, negatively impacts someone else’s game play. It’s a challenging game for keeping your cool to the end.
- Trouble is Aggravation in a different form.
- Jeopardy gives you the answers, but you only win if you ask the right questions
- In Snail’s Pace Race, the colored wooden snails are the winners, not the players moving them.
- Trivial Pursuit is lots of fun when you play with the right people, but can be a drag if you are playing in the wrong categories.
So, have at it, all the philosophers among you…What lessons for the game of life do these game names make YOU think about?
Through Changing Eyes 