"By
working
faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to
be boss and
work
twelve hours a day."
... Robert Frost
I am indebted to Don "Coach Don" Sullivan who inspired this
conversation.
Games
are
playedthe way
we construe they're
played.
To this end, some
games
come with
clearlywritten
rules: Monopoly, Clue (or "Cluedo" if you
play
the British version), Scrabble,
Chess,
Soccer, and Cricket for example. They also come with a
clearlywritten
purpose. If you're going to
play
these
games,
then
the way
you construe they're
played,
better match their
written
rules and purpose - otherwise it's
"Game
over!" before you've even
begun.
Then there are other
games
we
play
(and
play
often) which come with hardly any
written
rules and no purpose at all. We kind of have to figure out the purpose
of these
games
as we go along.
Chief
among these
games
which come with hardly any
written
rules and no purpose, is the
game
of
Life itself
- of course I'm talking about the real dealgame
of Life, not the Hasbro board
game
version. Yes there are a smattering of
written
rules for the
game
of Life:
stop
at
red
lights / go on green ones, travel with a valid passport, don't overdraw
your checking account, put enough stamps on the envelope - you know,
that sort of thing. But as for its overall purpose, you have to
construe your own, given the
game
of Life doesn't come with a
written
purpose (as
Richard Buckminster
"Bucky" Fuller
may have said).
Consider
this: one
way
of construing the purpose of the
game
of Life, is it's to win. Winning the
game
of Life, is a purpose which is derived (so to
speak)
from our instinct ie from our innate
drive
to survive. Implicit in this winning / surviving derived purpose, is
when we win, someone or something else has to lose. So by construing
the purpose of the
game
of Life this way, we've sown the seeds for the unworkable
"you or me
world"
paradigm (as
Werner Erhard
may have said).
Another
way
of saying this is: the construed purpose of the
game
of Life is to
succeed.
And for the most part, we each define our own yardstick for our own
success. The thing is this construing is likely to
entrap
all of us.
How
so? (and well may you
ask):
when we define what success will be for ourselves, we're
also subtly defining ourselves as not yet successful. Gee!
I hope you get that. It's very
Zen
ie it's very subtle. It's pernicious.
So I assert what's more profound than construing the purpose of the
game
of Life to be winning / success, is construing it to be
completion
ie being
complete,
living life in the state of being
complete
- which is to say living life coming from already beingcomplete.
To live life coming from already being
complete,
you have to bring your own already
completion
to everything you do.
Now at this juncture, some
friendly
smart rats are likely to say "No
Laurence,
the purpose of the
game
of Life is to be
transformed"
ie to
becometransformed
ie that the purpose of the
game
of Life is
transformation.
I'll buy that for a
dollar.
Bringing
transformation
to bear on the purpose of Life can only lead to good things. However,
if I were to articulate these ideas more
rigorously
as a cohesive, seamless whole, then rather than success being the
purpose of the
game
of Life, and rather than
transformation
being the purpose of the
game
of Life, I would still bet you good
money
the intelligent purpose of the
game
of Life is
completion.
When we construe the purpose of the
game
of Life as being
complete,
we sow the seeds for the revolutionary
breakthrough
"you and me
world"
paradigm (also from
Werner).
OK, if that's so (notice I didn't say "if that's the
truth";
I said "if that's so") then what role does
transformationplay
in the purpose of the
game
of Life? Try this on for size: what if
transformation
is a shift which allows the construed purpose of the
game
of Life to morph from
success
to
completion?
Now that's a great
question.