The LIfe of Chess

Podcast

It was a bright spring afternoon and I was taking a stroll through the quiet neighborhood with my family. My dad, brother and I were taking turns passing a small, foam football back and forth and reveling in the good throws and awesome catches we managed. I was probably 14 years of age and looking good in public was a top priority for me.

I caught a pass that had gone long and felt the beauty of the moment. Everything was lined up as I ran onto the deep green grass strip next to the sidewalk and connected with the oblong ball that was my target. In my excitement to boast in my accomplishment and relive the details, I started walking further down the strip while my head was turned back towards my parents.

I knew there was a tree coming up and was surprised when I smashed into it head-first. I had assumed I was walking straight and would miss the tree. Turns out, however, that as my head was rotated, the rest of my body went off course, following the direction I was looking. My parents laughed at the comical scene and I was embarrassed, feeling like my life was over because I no longer looked cool, despite the amazing catch.

Luckily, I wasn’t scarred for life and began the process of learning an important life lesson: If you lose focus and don’t look where it is you want to go in life, you’ll get off track. As I learned this lesson more deeply over years of study and application, I noticed a connection to the idea of losing focus and the game of chess.

When my wife and I first got married, the only game we had was a chess set my friend had given me in high school. We played many games back to back for a while but eventually decided to put the set away because it became a source of contention for us rather than a nice form of entertainment. The biggest reason for the contention was that I kept losing and would get in a bad mood as we played. To cope with my losses, I concluded that I was simply not good at multitasking and managing all those different moving pieces in one concerted effort.

Years down the road, the contentious games of chess were forgotten. My wife and I decided to play together and asked why it had been so long. We soon remembered exactly why and almost decided to put it up for good. However, this time I didn’t just label myself as unable to multitask. Instead, I questioned why I felt incapable and realized that the brunt of my feelings of frustration in playing the game stemmed from my plans being foiled. My number one goal in playing chess had always been to not mess up, or, in other words, not lose any pieces. I never made a game plan; I just didn’t want to lose. If I did lose a piece that I wasn’t suspecting I would feel like all was lost and would be caught in a downward spiral.

As I thought through my tendencies while playing, it dawned on me that if I was hyper-focused on my goal not to lose pieces, I was missing the point of the whole game. The winner is not the one who loses the least pieces but is the one that is able to incapacitate his or her opponent’s king. This is true regardless of how many pieces are left, how long it takes, and how dynamic one player’s game-plan is or is not.

With this new enlightenment, I felt a desire not to win a game of chess but to use my creativity and knowledge of the pieces’ movements to formulate a plan of attack and see how that changed things. I told my wife of my lightbulb, self-reflection and promised not to get angry if I lost. She agreed to play again, and I lost a few times because, inevitably, she would make a move that frustrated or hindered the plan of attack I set out to deploy at the start of each game.

Yet, since my focus was on learning how to strategize according to the purpose of the game, I soon found a balance between updating my plan as the game progressed and seeing how her pieces affected my king.

And then it happened.

For the first time ever, I was able to checkmate my opponent’s king by following through on a strategy that I laid out and manipulated as needed, depending on where her pieces were. It felt great to not only know what the pieces do but to understand how to play the game of chess.

Not only that, but once I learned how to strategize in this way and gain the confidence to push through the opposition, I started making a connection from my setbacks in chess to those in my life challenges. The moment I started doing well in chess was the moment I focused on the point of the game. Similarly, there were other things in life I was failing at because I was not recognizing the main point of what I was working on.

The scriptures point out this failing to understand as missing the mark. Jacob 4:14 – “But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall”.

The Jews looked beyond the mark. After my nice football catch, I looked away from the mark. Then, during my struggles to play chess, I completely disregarded the mark. In each of these scenarios, the key point is that my focus on the correct mark was not there.

Just like in chess, one big aspect of life is a push to become an individual who is no longer frustrated by changes and setbacks. Our opponent is the devil and the things that keep us from focusing on following the gospel of Jesus Christ. When we do make mistakes, there is a plan in place for us to utilize the Atonement of Christ. It is also important to recognize that Heavenly is the grandmaster. He has everything figured out and it is ultimately His strategy in play. We only need to trust Him to incapacitate our opponent and reach our goals. We don’t have to face checkmate in this life. We are participating in the Lord’s ‘game’ of strategy, the life of chess.