Life isn’t a game.

Life, despite popular belief, isn’t a game. It’s the prize.

If you suspect that life might, in truth, be a game, your next step might be to try to figure out what kind of game it is. My recommendation is that you skip that step altogether. Instead, ask yourself what you think the goal might be: a) to win or b) to have fun.

Not that those two are mutually exclusive, but rather to note that they are a) not the same, and b) winning is what happens when the game is over. Hence, in all likelihood, longevity-wise, not the fun it’s cracked up to be.

On the other hand, it’s easy to understand why we make that mistake – thinking that life is a game. Because when we are playing a game, and the game is good and we are playing well, we feel more, well, alive. And we call it “fun.” But the real fun of fun is not because of the game, it’s because of the experience of aliveness, of being in life, in the whole of it, completely. That’s the prize, if you want to call it that, the feeling of being alive. Like the feeling you get when just jump into the swimming pool without even testing how cold the water is first (just look at the dog in the photo!), or the feeling of almost drowning in your lover’s  eyes (look at the photo again, lol), or the feeling you get when you watch animals at play: the sheer aliveness of it all.

And as long as we think of it as a game, especially one that we think we can win, we pretend that we haven’t won yet. We pretend that when we win, and only when we win, we’ll have something we can really celebrate, something we can delight in, victory at last. When all along, the fun, the aliveness we’ve been experiencing is the only victory that counts. The only victory.

And isn’t that just like life?

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