Out of Book

2/28/2023

Life is like a game of chess

I don't play chess. I sort of know the basics of the game and I love stories about chess masters, but I'm not interested in learning to play it.

Unlike me, my 17-year-old son loves to play chess. Lately, he's been sharing interesting chess facts with me. For example, he recently told me "there are more possible variations of chess games than observable atoms in the universe." Which basically blew my mind.

Coincidentally, the next day a friend shared a meme about chess. "Life is like a game of chess," the meme says. It ends with, "I don't know how to play chess." Of course, this meme is funny because it implies that the person not only doesn't know how to play chess, he also doesn't know how to live life.

The Game of Chess

Then another chess coincidence happened that week. While I was working at my sewing machine, I pushed play on Radiolab, one of my favorite podcasts. It just so happened that they were rebroadcasting an episode on games, which included a whole lot of interesting information about chess. My ears piqued.

As I listened, I learned the chess term "out of book". This term quickly caught my fancy. If you don't know this idea - as I didn't - here's the background: there exists a "book" of all the chess moves that have happened throughout the history of the game. Although it's not a real book, in Moscow there is an actual library of all these recorded moves. This library has been kept since the 16th century and, like most things, it recently has been digitized. Basically, during a game of chess, most of the moves players make have already been made before in past games. (The digital book can even tell you how many times before each particular play has occurred!) But, not all of the possible variations of chess moves have been made before. When a player come to the point in the game that isn't in the book, the play is now considered to be "out of book". The way chess analyst Fred Friedel explained it on the the Radiolab episode is my favorite. He says when your play is out of book, "you have a position which has never occurred before in the universe."

Wow. Consider that!

The Game of Life

Traditions are the life equivalent of playing by the book. The book of life says: go to school, get a job, get married, have a family. Traditions can be great; they provide quick and easy answers to basic life decisions.

In the game of chess, it's easy to tell when players are playing by the book. Their moves are quick and decisive. These moves are easy because the players have them memorized. They've been done so many times before that no thought is necessary. It's when play reaches the point of being out of book that the game becomes a challenge and slows down. Now, players have to think about each move they might make. They have to consider all the possibilities and all the consequences of each move and can no longer rely on what's been done before.

Traditional paths are so well-worn we can feel that
not only are they the correct way -
but the only way.

We humans can be really hard on ourselves. We beat ourselves up when we feel we did something wrong. But life isn't always predictable. If we learn anything from the game of chess - and the unfathomable number of possible plays there may be in a game - it's that not everything is in the book. Not everything has been done before. There are times when you may "have a position which has never occurred before in the universe."

For me, the pandemic created a whole slew of things that never happened before. I didn't know how to make money as an artist. My two teenagers fell into depressions. Tradition was no help, life was out of book. And just like the game of chess, everything was slow and challenging at this point. It makes sense to me now: my brain needed time to process absolutely everything. At the time though, it was awful, exhausting and terrifying. I felt incredibly guilty and constantly felt that I wasn't doing enough. The problem was, that I didn't know what I should be doing.

Possibility

My journal page on the concept of Out of Book

Personally, I think this might be the most exciting part! Okay, the exciting part probably doesn't come until after quite a bit of heart-ache and depression. It can be a challenge to adjust to the unknown. What usually happens first for me is that I feel like a loser and I'm extremely sad and I feel sorry for myself and I want to give up.

But after that I come out on the other side feeling excited. All of a sudden there are possibilities I didn't know existed.

"Look at that!" I say to myself, "It's okay to step off the well-worn path! You can make your own path."

It's actually more than okay! It's amazing.