Been playing a Tetris style game* a little bit recently, and it struck me what a nice metaphor it is for life.
The game starts off slowly as you gradually get the hang of the falling pieces, fitting them into each other, while you try to make something solid out of it all. In essence the game says, ‘deal with this random-ness,’ which also seems to be one of life’s main messages. What makes the game such an apt metaphor is that you don’t really know what’s coming next, except for the very next brick. Life, of course, gives no such warning. This ‘not knowing’ makes the game both fun and frustrating as you could be waiting a long time for that ideal piece to complete the structure you started…
“If only that long one would fall!”
How many times has that happened to you? You wait and wait for something particular, something you always wanted to fit into a certain space in your life, all while you are still keeping up with what is relentlessly falling on top of you. Sometimes that special piece never comes, or as it happens, when you have finally given up on it ever appearing, then it decides to show up.
The game speeds up the better you get at it, unlike life, which seems to follow its own capricious rhythm – which for me always seems to be at that breakneck, trying-to-kill-you pace. But you just have to deal with it, and get stuff done, taken care of, make it disappear, because if you don’t, stuff just piles up on top of you until you can’t take it anymore, have a nervous breakdown, and well, have to start the game over.
If only it were as easy to start life over as it is the game. In some ways it is and in many ways it isn’t. Depends on how enslaved you are to the particular game you’re playing.
* More correctly, I’m playing a Tetris-like game that came with my mobile phone, called QuadraPop, but it follows the same principle as Tetris and has essentially the same gameplay.
