Chess as an Analogy of Life

I was recently led to an author and a book that I did not know.  I don’t claim to be a literary expert and it often shows!  The author is Matt Haig and the book is The Midnight Library, published in 2020.  I am part of a group that recently looked at a few passages from this book.  There was no context for the passage and I still have not read the book.  So, it may be dangerous to comment on it because I risk not knowing what I am talking about.  But undaunted, I plunge ahead anyway!

A little background checking tells me that Haig is an English citizen who lives in Brighton.  I have been to Brighton a number of times and enjoy being there on the English Channel.  I was told he bases some of his stories on his own “mental breakdown he suffered when he was 24 years old” and that he “still suffers from anxiety from time to time.”  Added without an afterthought, I was told he was an atheist.  I had to laugh at the non-sequitur.  Having anxiety does not necessarily lead to atheism!

The book tells the story of Nora, who endeavors to commit suicide and succeeds.  As such, she wakes up in a make-believe library which helps her understand the choices in life.  All this is enough for me to buy the book and read it.  But here I simply want to go with a couple of the quotations that occupied our group.  I think they provoke our thinking apart from whatever their context might be in the novel.

Mrs. Elm is the librarian in the midnight library.  At one point she speaks to Nora.  “Look at that chessboard we put back in place…Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts.  It’s a beautiful thing.  But it is boring.  It is dead.”  Right away we recognize that the game of chess is offered as an analogy for life.  In effect, I hear the author telling us to be careful of a life that is so ordered, safe and ostensibly peaceful that it is effectively boring and dead.  Life lived fully never looks that way.  

This is where the author takes us.  Haig says “…the moment you make a move on that board, things change.  Things begin to get more chaotic.  And that chaos builds with every single move you make.”  So it seems with life.  Living our lives is like making moves on the chessboard.  Things begin to change.  Chaos enters our life.  Our safe, ordered lives come under threat.  When we pay attention, we recognize some threats are actually opportunities.  This is where I believe spirituality enters.

To be spiritual is to pay attention.  It is to be willing to risk the changes that come with life.  It says Yes to the threats that inevitably come our way.  But when we are spiritually paying attention, we also see where and how these threats turn out to be opportunities.  For example, I think of some folks I have accompanied on their journey through cancer.  Hearing that word and acknowledging in some cases it will lead to our deaths can blow folks out of the water.  But others take it on, seek to learn what they can and die a remarkable death.  All this is better than dying an unremarkable death or dying without finding any deep peace and sense of okness.

Real life risks the chaos to get where God might want us to go.  But we have to make a choice.  God is not predestining autocrats shoving us around like those chess pieces.  This is the point of the next quotation I want to bring forward.  Again, the librarian is speaking.  “It’s an easy game to play…But a hard one to master.  Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities.  In chess, as in life, possibility if the basis of everything.”  Obviously, that is a clincher.  

The key is possibility.  It is the basis of everything, as Mrs. Elm notes.  If we think we have no more possibilities, then life as we want to live it is over.  We all know life is not static.  Each day I have 24 hours and then it is done---it dies.  As a new day come, so do my possibilities.  I choose to embrace those possibilities in the Spirit.  I invite God’s Spirit into the mix and maximize my possibilities.  I try to move my ego out of the way, so as to have more and better choices.

Now comes the climax of what little I know about the book.  The librarian continues.  “Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living…never underestimate the big importance of small things.”  That is the gem for me.  On my own, I so want to the big deal.  I want to be big and flashy.  But the truth is, if I got it, I likely would not handle it well.  It is as if I would win the lottery.  Being rich via the lottery actually ruins the life of most folks---even though they never think it will.

And so the gem is the small thing.  Value and cherish those.  Want to be rich?  Get a few really good friends.  Folks rich in friendship will probably be happier and more content that any millionaire.  Do you want the good life?  Serve others.  As long as we are in it for our egos, we will never find it.  There is no satisfaction there---or temporary satisfaction at best.  Getting out of ourselves is the best way to find ourselves.  So, make a big deal out of small things.