No matter how hard I try I can’t stop picturing the whole of one’s life as a game, one of those mission and tactics based ones, where you don’t just pound the joystick and pray for a miracle with zero skill or rely on your muscle memory hoping the fine motoric will do it all for you through some primal pathway. It really is like a game, the stakes are just higher. You need an objective to work for and manipulate the game towards a desired outcome, you need some hits of bonuses and extra lives, because there will be times the “Strength” tab will be almost tapped out. You’ll need some weapons acquired through more or less obscure encounters through the game and the weapons are skills, knowledge, character and experience. If you could collect some gold coins along the way that would be good as well because certain elements of the mission will need extensive financing. Take the potion from the druids, you have no idea what monsters you’re going to encounter along the way, listen to that guide leading you through a particularly difficult realm, play a bonus level you opened by solving that riddle….

 

So accept the way things are now in the world and strategize in order to align your behaviors and investments of time and energy into making it better. Accept that people are people and they will do people things. They will make mistakes, there will be betrayals, some hurt, some pain, things you will not be able to understand while they are happening, but there will also be immeasurable love, connection, depth, fullness, joy, healing… it will all be happening all at one. Accept that it may be beautiful even if it is not perfect, it may be beautiful exactly because it is not perfect. Having some challenge means there is an opportunity here as well. Accept that good, evil and neutral things coexist all the time and accept it will not always be clear which is which. Accept to be better at the game.

 

Focus. You know when you’re playing a game and you’re so fully immersed in it that you see nothing else, you don’t hear people talking to you in the real world nor see anything on the screen which is not useful to the mission you’re on (that’s called attention blindness). Do that in life as well. Focus on something, don’t get dissipated and decimated by pings, dings, sleeve pullers, nay sayers, the passive ones, the critics… Focus on your mission, When the screen says game over in this physical reality you don’t get a  do over. What you learnt along the way, who you’ve become, how well you served, how much you loved, what you left to make this place better, that’s it, that’s the whole shebang. Go all in, go full power, then rest, get gentle and kind again and do it all over again.