Game of Life - am I playing it right?

Life is like Tetris. A constant stream of problems to solve and then game over.

Old Mersey Ferry converted to a restaurant.

Game of Life - am I playing it right?

Is life a simulated video game? I don’t think so. I’m good at video games. They make sense and have a logical way to them that clicks with my brain. Tutorials get you started and teach you how to complete the game, because ultimately, the creators want you to progress through their creation. For actual life, though, there’s not much of that. Some at the start, but it’s a very basic overview that doesn’t take into account the character you are playing as, and often, aspects of that character aren’t fully understood until much later into the game. If Life were an actual game, I’d probably start over with a better understanding of how to play it rather than struggle on with a severely underpowered character. Real life does not have this feature, so we try our best to push on and progress through it.

Pushing on feels harder these days. There are so many issues to deal with to get out there and live, and none of them seem resolvable. Nothing I do seems to give me the confidence to level up and handle more, and the game keeps on going. Relentlessly, going. It’s like Tetris. At the start, it makes sense. You get a good few piece placements, a few rows disappear, and you feel good. As more pieces come down, you put some aside, thinking you’ll sort them later. More pieces come at you, and the screen starts filling up with pieces to sort. Eventually, a piece that makes all your problems go away will arrive, right? Right?! It’ll happen if I keep storing some on the side. The screen keeps filling up, hope fades, and eventually, your game is over. Some people do better, others do worse. That’s just how things are. Tetris is life. You get buried under a mountain of things to sort that you believe you’ll get to one day if only you had the right pieces.

Speaking of winning at games, my friends recently completed the Rustman challenge, the local version of the Ironman. This year, the 200km route, called ‘From sea to summit’, was to;

Cycle from New Brighton to West Kirby
Run/swim from West Kirby - Hilbre Island - Talacre
Cycle from Talacre to Llyn Padarn
Swim Llyn Padarn to Llanberis
Walk from Llanberis to Snowdon summit

Any single one of those activities is a challenge, let alone all in one day. I recommend Kev’s 20-minute video on how he handled it, or Graham’s minute-long highlight reel. Epic.

I look at the challenges my friends in the outdoor community do, and I’m in awe. I would love to be doing something with my life, be that making a decent wage, having a decent career or being able to just bloody get on with living. But I’m struggling, endlessly struggling. Pieces keep falling from the sky, and I put them to one side, hoping to eventually deal with them, but I never do because more pieces fall from the sky.

My anxiety and overthinking hold me back from doing so much. I feel like I can never get it together to do anything like this, despite having trained and run a marathon. So I asked some of the people involved with the Rustman challenge about how they coped. They answered with “Believe” (Yes, Ted Lasso is a member) and strangely, one of them said, “You’re doing it, Pete.” Really? No. I’m doing it? Have you seen my bank balance? Have you seen all these Tetris pieces I’ve got to stack? I’m not... Am I?

There’s a 2,500-year-old Buddhist idea, the First Noble Truth. “Life is suffering.” That doesn’t mean life is always awful, painful, and we should quit. It means that life isn’t perfect or even ideal. It just is, and if we can accept that, maybe we can accept the everyday flaws in our lives and move past them. We live when we accept this about life, and I struggle to accept this.

I struggle to believe I am “doing it”, because surely life would be perfect if I were “doing it”. However, if life is never perfect and always contains suffering, then maybe I am indeed “doing it”. My issue is confidence, self-belief, and acceptance that my life isn’t someone else’s, nor is it perfect, but it is, in fact, my life and I am doing it. While the people I admire were able to do things I can’t, they didn’t wear a skirt to the lake the next day in an attempt to challenge gender norms. I did. How? I believed I could, so I did. They saw me doing it, living.

My biggest issue is not that I have Tetris pieces falling on top of me, and that I feel like I’m rubbish at Tetris, aka life, but that I’m unable to see that we all struggle with playing the game in our way. In the entire 35 years of Tetris, only one person has completed it. Everyone fails at Tetris. Everyone is eventually overwhelmed by it. Everyone suffers. Yet every time I try, I feel like I’m bad at it because I fail and compare myself to others. What if, instead, I merely enjoyed playing a game of Tetris for a few minutes? What if I accepted that the game will beat me and that it will be a struggle to progress, but fun in its own way? What if I could accept that I am doing it, and that believing that is enough to keep playing?

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