Post photo: chess pieces | © Steve Buissinne on Pixabay
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good friday morning
A poem by Christian Morgenstern, whose poems i already in 2012 once on the subject had. This poem also encourages reflection and also goes quite well with my last two blog posts.
good friday morning
Today an old person wants
die again to the grave
and the new one shall be from him
nothing but inherit the will
after the final success
to penetrate deeper and deeper.You too can help to achieve this goal
Christian Morgenstern
with your own die and become!
let us unite our earth
purify, nobler substances!
let us, dear life mine,
to be the wings of a longing!
Play
If it were up to me, I could reduce all games to chess. Since I first played in the 1990s, I've been playing regularly and mostly losing. I prefer to lose when my opponent beats me and I don't know until the end of the game where I did something wrong.
Since 1997 I have also been using the chess program "Shredder“, which accompanies me everywhere. Stefan Meyer-Kahlen has developed a suitable opponent for almost every chess player with this program. The program is now very mature and I had to contact support maybe three times, and I was always able to get help within two days.
Admittedly, I only use the simple possibilities of the program; now it can do a lot more besides letting me keep losing. In the event that I should win regularly, I have further options at my disposal.
And so, after all these years, I have to acknowledge that the cost of the program has been more than worth it.
But since it's not just up to me, there are other games on our game nights that I've often written about. The nice thing about it for me is that it increases the chances of winning once in a while.
But since yesterday there's another game on my agenda and I owe it to an impromptu game night. The new game for me is called "Dobble“ and showed me very quickly that I have brain regions that had probably remained very unused until now.
With 55 cards and five game variants, it ensures that up to eight players have a lot of fun and older players like me will also find a mental challenge that they probably only know from the game of memory. Anyone who is regularly "ripped off" by small children there will certainly learn their lessons here as well. Yesterday, all game night participants were sure that we will deal with this game more often in the future.
Know-it-all
We all are, without a single exception. It would be very advantageous if there were as many do-it-yourselfers as possible. In the meantime, I am firmly convinced that we all really lack do-it-yourselfers and I am happy when I meet people who do anything at all, apart from the very convenient announcement of better knowledge.
Over the years, I have repeatedly met real artists who have made knowing better their own recipe for success and who have also managed to reach the successful end of their glorious career without their own products of any kind, not to mention measurable successes that own career apart from retiring from professional life. Even today I look back at such people with great admiration - in my eyes these are the ultimate masters of life!
But I don't admire those artists at all who actually leave only rubble, death and ruin behind them again and again and until the glorious end. Unfortunately, these artists are now very common and can even be found in the highest political offices - they seem to be flushed into such offices.
In my immediate environment, I am now more than satisfied when I meet people who are doing something and I haven't looked at them for a long time to see if they are doing it better.
Because one can always bicker over the word "better" and will hardly come to a common understanding. That's why I think knowing and doing is the better choice. And because knowledge is becoming increasingly rare in general, the only thing left is actually doing.
And so one might come to the conclusion that one should simply try the mere doing, whereby over time this doing constantly improves on its own and, moreover, perhaps even leads to knowledge at some point.
Knowing better, on the other hand, should only be reserved for the true life artists among us.
"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall see soon, a formal system — no matter how powerful — cannot lead to all truths.”
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1999 [1979]:252)
