MONOPOLY IT AIN'T

They say life is a game. Well, it's one heck of a game if you ask me. It's a game two other people got you into without your approval. You have to find out the most important rules for your self while simultaneously playing the game, and, most interestingly, you can't win. No thanks, I'll pass on that game. Oops! I can't do that either. If I'm alive, I'm playing.

The life game does have a winner, it's just not you. Death is the ultimate winner. Death is like a well-camouflaged, sharp-shooting, game piece hidden behind the heavy trees on the ridge overlooking your life being played out in the valley below. Death's job is to pick off everything of importance around you. Maybe on a slow day Death will just play with your world like a cat plays with a mouse. He will wound or take out those special to you just for something to do. Then when death gets really bored he'll put a slug right between your eyes, and there is not one darn thing you can do about it. Death always wins.

I know this sounds cynical, but reality often does sound cynical. When you really "get' that life and the lives of those around you are finite, only then can you begin to truly live life the way it is, not the way you would like life to be.

If you view immortality as winning life's game, you're a loser right out of the blocks. Who would want to live forever? As Woody Allen said, "Some people want immortality and they can't think of what to do on a Saturday night." If you look at life as a trip, as something you do between birth and death, you win the game by simply enjoying and maximizing each day. Enjoying what you have when you have it is the only way you can thumb your nose at the sniper on the hill.

Lesson:  Life's game is not about winning or losing; it has to be about how you play the game because there is nothing else.