[If you read my blog post last week about free association, you will recognize the same principle at work in this post. The trigger for writing this was my husband, John, crowing about winning a game in an online chess tournament.]
John plays chess. I don’t, although I know the moves. When we first got married he played on an electronic chess board which was not very satisfactory. Finally after much persuasion I agreed to play chess with him. We played one game and I won! Don’t ask me how. It was sheer luck on my part. We never played again.
I find chess a very aggressive game. I believe it was developed on the principles of war. Not being particularly aggressive myself I’d rather walk away than engage. That’s why I wonder about all this conflict all over the world. We had a rhyme when we were children. One child would run to the top of a pile of dirt and sing: “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal.” We lived where there were new houses being built so there were lots of piles of dirt around. With real world conflict it is just the same. One groups climbs onto the pile of dirt and chants like children and begins throwing rocks and the other side throws back in an attempt to keep their pile of dirt. Of course, we didn’t throw rocks as children or only once and I got a cut just above my eye. My mother put a stop to that. It could have escalated. We could have graduated to larger rocks, then boulders, then bombs and then where would we be? Certainly not playing chess.
