Life is a Game. A Story. It’s Yours.

This picture is my own made from an assortment of board game pieces I had lying around. (They’re Chinese Chess Pieces and Go Stones.)

Yesterday I had the honor of speaking with a lady while volunteering at a hospital and she was telling me about how she never liked video games.  She said that life is a game that doesn’t have a reset button.  She laments the way that games are: if you mess up, it’s fine.  There is always a reset button.  But real life doesn’t.  People take that reset button for granted and don’t take life as seriously as they should.

Although we come from different generations, the things she said aren’t things I haven’t noticed.  The possibility of a reset button, the limited interactions, the obsession with fictional “reality,” and the inability of many to effectively communicate and express themselves.  These things are just the tip of the iceberg.  We, me included, obsess over things like fictional pairings and invest ourselves in stories that never were.  This is in no way bad.  In fact, by learning and reading about these stories, we ourselves can develop, grow, and learn from things the characters go through.  Learn how people carry themselves, how they respond, and be inspired by them.  The possibilities are limitless, but it’s when people don’t realize all the things they could be learning and “mindlessly focus” on gaming and winning that this obsession turns pointless.  In moderation, stories are great things to hear about, talk about, and apply to our lives.  But as I have been realizing, getting sucked into the vortex of others’ stories has been leading me astray from my own.  My own story, my legacy, is something I have to actively work for.  I want the mark I make on the world to matter.  And although in the long run, in comparison to the stars in the sky, our own lives are insignificant.  Maybe.  Maybe we all are.  But hope.  Always hope that the story you leave behind is one that you can be proud of.

One of my favorite quotes from a song is “Character is shown by the things that we do.”  Show your character by proving who you are.  Find a purpose in your life, some gap to fill in the world and try achieving it.  There’s no time to get depressed.  Little time to get sad because when life moves on, you can either push yourself up and keep running towards the future or get sucked into the void of oblivion.  Forgotten because you got caught up in things that are quite frankly useless in the long run.  If life is a game, then this game has no end.  There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no ultimate destiny.  Just coins one can accumulate, little victories.  What matters in the end is how much you managed to change your surroundings.  The impact and the imprints you made on others.  We are remembered by others just as infinitesimal in the universe– that’s the hope anyways.  And our legacy is our own to write.

A/N: I’ll delve more into hospital volunteering in my other blog, Niche Of A Nerd, so keep tuned there!  I intended to write about the lady’s views and interlink it with some of my own.  But in the end, I was feeling somewhat philosophical and existential, so the end result strikes me like a glob of random thoughts drifting about my mind.  (I may or may not be contemplating the words of a broody vampire *coughs Carmilla* a bit too much lately.)  My grades, outlook on the future, and the goals I have for myself may also have something to do with the cascade of emotions.