February 18th, 2008

I have a friend, currently in the last couple of his teen years, basically a near-adult. I first met him when he was 5 or 6, and now he's got that sudden edge of maturity that you suddenly notice people having around their 18th or 19th birthday. I love to see it in him, though it did kind of creep up on me. Anyhow, for whatever reason, I had a memory this morning of him at age 7 playing a game with his elementary school classmates (at recess and after school) called "Freeze".

Now this game had a set of rules that were, I suspect, rather fluid. You'd see them crawling around the Jungle Jim, at which point one person would shout, "freeze!" to someone who had the bad misfortune of touching the sand. That person would have to stand still until unfrozen by someone. I think the last item they touched determined whether or not they were qualified to unfreeze people. Or maybe they were pre-designated to be an "unfreezer".

For all I know, the alignment of the planets and the day of the week had something to do with it as well.

Certainly, it was clear that there was an inner logic to the game that only the participants seemed to understand, and which seemed to be as complicated to understand as it was wonderful to watch. My former -er- friend and I loved to sit and watch this game unfold because of its sheer incomprehensibility to an outside observer. It was ornate and somehow gothic in its execution and appearance: a series of starts and stops that, though seemingly arbitrary, was really a elaborate agreed-upon set of rules.

And it's that agreed-upon nature that really impressed me. A bunch of 7-year-olds playing a highly complex game with no real victories or defeats, except on a small scale. Though some kids got frozen while others had to touch the pole three times and move from Point A to Point B without crossing the path of anyone else (and without touching the sand) while someone else was frozen, unless you had already been on the slide ... well, you get the point: It was far more complex than most people ordinarily credit kids of that age as being capable of. Overall, the image and feeling I got out of the game was not a competition between the kids at all, but a grand and glorious spirit of cooperation. In order to successfully navigate that large and detailed set of rules, they needed to work together to finish the game. Once or twice, even, the whole game stopped for a moment while one or more of the kids worked out, through reasonable conversation, which rule was applicable in some even more complicated situation. It was beautiful to behold.

And it told me something that maybe could be a life-lesson (uh-oh, I just heard people clicking the Back buttons on their browsers): The game was so difficult that they could only successfully play it by collaborating. Competition wasn't possible when the game was so challenging.

Let's think about that for a quick moment. In fact, let's extract what we can from it and apply it to adult lives: When the "game" gets too tough to compete, we must adopt a set of cooperation skills or not be able to play the game at all. Do you see? Competition is a luxury borne of a life comfortable enough to allow it. When life becomes too difficult to live in competition, we must start working together ... or die.

And that, I guess, is why the thought of those kids playing that immensely complicated game sticks in my mind: It is entertaining, sure, but it is also instructive.

It is hopeful.

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