How You’ll Win the Game Of Life

Have you have noticed lately that your feelings can swing from good to bad – sometimes wildly and sometimes mildly?

This is because we all see the world in terms of either black or white.

We do this to create meaning – if everything is all black, we would say ‘there’s nothing to see here’.

Likewise if everything is all white, it would be as good as being blind: there would be no difference.

And ‘Difference’ is the key.

We then assign values to the things, it can be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, ‘off’ or ‘on’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The thing is, in a lot of areas of our life we create a polarity of values – off is the opposite of on, etc.

But it depends on the context. If you look at a picture and there is a white dot on a black background, you could say it is ‘good’, because we can see it. Conversely a black dot on a white background could be ‘good’ because we also see it.

But you could look at a white background with a black dot as a white box with a hole in it. The word ‘hole’ could imply ‘bad’ not good.

One of the biggest traps we all fall into is saying that ‘white must win’. In other words, we favour one state over the other.

For example, think of any sports match – we always have our preferred team that we want to win.

However, this can lead to problems. Investing your emotional energy on the outcome of a sports match, you are either extremely happy if your team wins, or extremely unhappy if they lose.

Whilst a sports match may be trivial, the same behaviour applied to more important parts of life can be devastating if you lose, or ecstatic if you win.

So how to overcome this? Most eastern philosophy systems such as Buddhism propose the idea that everything is one and one is everything. There is ‘no’ difference in the world – it is only our minds that create this difference.

To cope in the modern ‘Western’ world, the key is to accept that all outcomes are possible.

However, also accept that we have preferred and non preferred outcomes, but ultimately life ‘is what it is’.

The key is not to invest your emotional energy into an outcome in the first place.

Strangely, in order to ‘Win’ the game of life, you need to ‘not win’ the game of life!