Go

There is a game, Go, which is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. Read about it, it’s interesting. It is played for hours and days, and its difficulty is in its simplicity. You only have stones, white or black, and you just need to arrange them to cover more territory. This apparent simplicity gives incredible complexity, because there are no winning strategies. Every new move can change the balance so that you end up with nothing. You may be greedy, trying to grab more territory or not keeping an eye on it — and here your opponent puts his stones some way, and there your territory is no longer yours.

Recently, I realised there’s a fairly clear analogy with life, where the rules are also nondeterministic, and the complexity is high. This analogy has helped me to draw a rather unexpected conclusion: time does not exist. Time in the sense that this is the beginning, this is the end, it does not exist. There is something else, there is a feeling that tomorrow will be tomorrow, and yesterday it was yesterday. “Your move” — “his move” cycles, if you will.

We wake up every morning and remember who we are, where we are, why we are. Going to bed, we think about what we’ve done and what we have to do tomorrow. But it’s all very conditional. We have no influence on anything, in general. Yes, we all have some desires, goals. But the goals, if you look at them, are just a hope to do something today that will help tomorrow-you.

In the morning, there are only memories of what happened yesterday. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wonder what the fuck you did yesterday. And sometimes, damn it, you wake up in another country and think, how come the last five years have passed to no avail?

In the morning you can be in one mood, and by the evening you’ll be in completely different frame of mind. Mood swings, ya? In the morning you can be hopeless, but by evening it feels good. What life strategy should I build? What should I do? I can’t get a grasp on it.

Eckhart Tolle was right in his “The Power of Now“, he was god damn right. There is a cat or even a dog, and I think they are quite happy, they live today and only now. And I live with all my memories about past and hopes for the future, and these memories are not always good memories, and these hopes are not always good expectations at all, sometimes on the contrary, they are some damn prophecies. And you have to understand that these memories and hopes are not quite true, they are emotionally charged, and therefore unreliable, and sometimes completely false. Have you ever seen video recordings with you from any events a decade ago? It would seem that you remember these things — how cool we were, how stylish and funny! And now you watch these videos and think, “oh fuck’s sake”.

Do you have to think about it so much and worry about it? No, you don’t, there are a lot of people who live and don’t think about such matters, and they’re pretty good at it. You just have to accept and understand that “now” is the only thing you really have. You have to love it. We don’t have any yesterdays, we just woke up in the morning with a set of certain facts: age, state of health, who is near, who is far away, who is no longer there with us, what you have in the pocket and on the bank account. And, in my opinion, in the morning you just need to remember that tomorrow’s “you” will still want to live no worse than today’s “you”. Understanding this simple fact can lead to a plenty of things, from training your body to taking care of the quite distant future-you which will need to live somewhere on some money. It’s better to spend a lot of effort building a foundation now than trying to turn a shack into a palace when there are no capabilities nor opportunities anymore.

And yes, there’re some thoughts about moments of consciousness. I know this is ridden to death, but there aren’t many such moments in our lives, especially since the advent of smartphones. At work we just exist, and when we commute, we also just exist, clogging the brain with everything from feeds of the next social network. Guess what we do home? We just exist, doing our home work. And there are very, very few moments free from automatism, though they are so beautiful. Recently, I was walking in the park, thinking about something, looking around, admiring the nature, turning off all my thoughts, trying to dissolve into what surrounded me. I did it. I felt myself just there, united with the universe. A splendour moment of just being there.

What a thrill it is to be alive.