***Bejeweled and the Game of Life

What do you do when your mind is so full of stuff that you find it just zipping from one “to do” to another? Occasionally, I do something mindless, like play the game Bejeweled. In flying to my son’s college graduation on Friday, I had some time on the airplane and thought I’d get lost into a game. For those of you that don’t know the game, there are a series of 8 columns of colored gems, with about 8 gems in each column. You exchange the position of two different colored gems to make sets of 3 matching gems, then they disappear and other gems move down to fill the empty space of the ones that disappeared. It’s a game that you can play from the top, middle or bottom. I’ve never really mastered this game because I rarely play things like this, however Friday was different.

As I started to play I was equating the game to life. There’s a lot of easy fruit at the top, but when you pick that and it’s gone, there’s rarely anything else remaining and often you’re stuck with “No More Moves” flashing across your screen. This morning I decided to do something a bit different for a change. I looked at the screen and would only move gems at the bottom or in the middle. Just like life, I wanted to go deep and stay centered.

I found that if I focus on the superficial stuff that can appear at the surface, you deal with that only until there are no more choices remaining in life. However, when you dig deep and make decisions from a deep place, based on the core of who you are, just like the gems on the bottom of my game, the rest easily lines up leaving you with a multitude of choices. I found my simple game of escape from thinking, being anything but that. Instead of a diversion, it became a meditation. With each deep move, I asked myself, “What does this mean to me??”

I proceeded to play what is usually a 5-minute game, but with this new strategy it became the game that never ends. With each strategic deep move, so many options appeared on the surface, so that I never ran out of choices. I actually laughed at how simple the game was once I figured out this one tiny thing. Just like in life. When we make choices from a deep level based on a belief that we hold dear, our choices never end. However, when we just pick the easy fruit without looking into the depths of who we are, the choices often dwindle quickly and we scurry around exhausting them one by one.

Our two-hour flight landed and I’d broken every record for this game- and I still wasn’t finished. Just like life. In prior games I’d normally achieve a score of 5,000, of maybe 10,000 on a really good day. This time, I had to turn off the game at a score of 60,000 and it was so easy- now to master this principle in life and make it that easy too! Work from the bottom up, not the top down. Focus on the deep stuff- the stuff that really matters, and lots of choices will appear on the surface for us to select from. Hmmmm, I’ve got to try this “for real”. Care to join me in the experiment?