The Game of Life.

I have never laughed harder.   A group of us are sitting around the table after a long week.  The kids are in bed, child care provided by fellow neighbours, and the wine and beer flows freely.  We’re playing the new game that is taking the ecovillage by storm. 

Our usual game repertoire is full of complex and fun board games like Catan, Dominion, and Carcassonne.  You’ll often see a chess board out on a front porch.  This game is not what I would expect to be a competitor to these sophisticated thinking games.  Our new game is a morph between Pictionary and Telephone.  It is a riot… and it has a lesson to teach us all.

The game begins with a group of people, and a stack of paper for each person equal to the number of players.  Everyone either writes a phrase, or draws a picture of something they are thinking of.  We then pass the whole stack to the right.  When you receive the neighbour’s stack, you decipher what you see, turn the page, and either draw what you’ve read, or write what you think you see.  Then you continue to pass to the right.  When the stacks have made it all the way to the original owner, we share the metamorphosis of our original thought…

… and then we laugh.  We don’t just laugh.  We howl.

We laugh as we see the logical progression of “Hit and Run” to “Chicken on a Bench.”  Each picture justifies the writing.  We see where the story goes wrong.  We laugh and we offer our compassion to the poor sucker that had to draw the “franken- bride” that was supposed to be “John Travolta” and the “volcano” that also does look EXACTLY like a “wizard hat”.  We understand when “surf beach” is generic to one is a detailed paragraph describing the “the sun is out, the man is surfing, and the woman is puking her marguerita”.  Some people are just far more descriptive than others.

People don’t always see me as a deep person.  Especially not when I’m drawing “cars running over eggs” and “vampires licking cherries”.  But I had to sit back for a minute as we all sat there howling with laughter at the simple and understandable miscommunications between us.  Sure I saw a “corn dog with a bite out of it”.  But I also can see how it could look like “a man stealing a bite from a corn dog”.  And I get how that can morph so quickly to a “a man running from an angry carnie”.  I get it. 

And I actually think it is the best game to call the official game of the ecovillage.  It certainly reflects the nature of our life here sometimes.  Life in Community can sometimes look like a big game of Telephone Pictionary.  Something you hear or see can be interpreted so quickly to be different than it was intended.  We turn the paper in the stack and react to what we “think” came first.  One reaction so easily causes another.

I suppose it is human of us to interpret what we see to the best of our ability.  To me, the game is a simple reminder of just how human it is to interpret differently from one person to another.  If we could only hold up each stack of paper to see the progression of some of our interactions at the village, we’d remember far more easily that important part is not how we’ve drawn, or written… but how we choose to play the game.  When someone misinterprets your hamburger to be a UFO… Do you get upset?  Or do you choose to howl with laughter? 

Thanks to Tam and Joel for a nice night out.  And welcome to buck and Sonya who draw as well as any of the rest of us.  See you at breakfast with Santa at the Yarrow Community Hall tomorrow.

If there aren't pictures yet-  check back.  I think I'll dig through the garbage and try and find some of our art to share!