Respawning from the last checkpoint
An Honest Experiment #5
<Start>
<Load Game>
Hello again!
Another week has come and gone. It’s almost 11 pm on a Monday and the days ahead look promising in the space I am in. I managed to work out, enjoyed some leftovers of a favourite family recipe (one I will only pass on to my firstborn), had a healthy sit-down and binge of Sex and the City and made some plans for the coming weeks. For the first time since I started this project, I feel renewed and ready to enter another realm. This adventurer is gathering up side quests and grinding for the next zone.
What does that look like?
A stronger social life, not so deeply insecure as I pushed in the past, but understanding and supportive enough that I can express things in a healthy way, and also listen and learn what I need to. <Quest Completed>
A look in the mirror that isn’t overly critical of every blemish, just a confident, smiling human, looking back at me with pride, cheering me on and celebrating every change, whether they are natural or by choice. <Quest Updated>
A firm hand on my savings and my boundaries as well as a relenting space for others to communicate theirs, working on the things I can control and accepting what I can’t. <Quest Updated>
A completed manuscript, ready to be sent everywhere to capture an interested agent or publisher that will at last print my name on a book and send more of my soul’s messages to those who need them. <Quest Item Required>
And of course, more adventures that inspire and enrich life, opening doors to more possibilities, more opportunities, and more compelling questlines. <Quest Accepted>
Progress is being made, even in the moments when you’re stopping to rest, the way I did on this day. You ought to rejuvenate your energy, allow your cooldown times before you can use your best abilities again, and stock up on potions to use for the next big boss fight. Oh, and don’t forget to —
<Save Game>
<Start>
<Load Game>
There were moments I had in the past few days that fill me with this unease. It’s a feeling of wholeness and emptiness all at once. As though I am charging into the next big boss fight, fully accustomed to the game’s mechanics and every strategy that I have played with every previous quest has worked well. I know my macros and I can whiz my moves across the keyboard with no problems, and my adventuring party is fully upgraded and geared to go.
Then the cutscene starts. My character is moving in on the villain I have slogged hours to be ready for. They talk, some big monologue about darkness and big master plans and how I am not prepared. I laugh to myself, The magic barriers go up, my companions are blocked off from me, the boss casts a spell or curse that inflicts damage over time or restricts my healing magic, or takes away all the big power-ups I had been saving just to beat them. Their health bars stack on top of the other while mine starts to drain, and the foreboding orchestral theme has barely reached its crescendo. The battle begins, and I am alone.
That is what went through my head Wednesday night. I had gone to a friend’s place just to pick up something I’d left behind at a party. While we had a nice chat over some coffee, on the way there and back, it was my cold reality.
I was…I am alone.
The big boss was right, I was not prepared for the isolation that blurred out the faces of strangers around me as I stood waiting for the train home. The streets opened up before me in the dark evening, and I felt powerless to walk them. Cars were lined up in the parking lot to drive other passengers the rest of the way home all warm inside and ready to go, but none were for me. How can one turn around this kind of deep sadness, this hollow loneliness?
In the cutscenes that bring us here to face these hidden foes, you can’t always tell how quickly you’ll have to change your tactic. There is always a way to beat the level and move forward, there’ll always be pros or cheat codes on the internet to get you closer to your goals. But nothing compares to going into it with no expectations and just letting the journey happen, playing at your own pace, in your own style.
I realised that while I may be alone, no one else can go through this journey. It’s mine. I can keep my eye out for my own glitches and hidden secrets, I can take in everything the cutscene tells me or I can skip it.
<Pause>
<Resume>
It’s 11:44am, Friday the 24th of June, and I was being lulled towards my laptop by Eckhart Tolle. I had come across a spiritual coach on YouTube (New World Allstar) recently and decided to heed his recommendation and read, or rather listen to, The Power of Now by Tolle. As of writing this, I am four chapters in, and already I am enjoying the great influence this book has given many of its readers. Taking the present as it is, in all its life and splendour, it’s flaws and its beauty, separate from the mind and body, is helping me heal a great deal. But in finding this YouTube Channel, in listening to Kurt and taking action to his words to help myself, I had already been practicing The Power of Now, as I understand it.
It’s amazing what you can find when you just sit and search where you are in the moment you’re in. Could be gold, could be armour, could be learning an ability or a secret you would have gone your whole life not knowing if you hadn’t stopped and taken that moment to find it.
Anyone who has witnessed me play a roleplaying game, they know I like to take my time and search every nook and cranny for stuff I would miss if I were to move on too soon. Sometimes I will come back to these people and ask them how to deal with a certain enemy or how to solve a puzzle that they themselves never knew existed. And they shake their head telling me they never took the time to do this or that quest. And thus this entry circles back to my previous section…knowing only you can do it, because you found it, and you may be the first in your circle, or in the fandom, to take the time for it, makes it uniquely your experience that no one can take away from you.
To think, perhaps, it was made for you. The developers often have a ways of sneaking in those extra easter eggs for you to find, simply to tell you that they were here too. Whether it’s God, the Universe, some alien overlord, your angels, your ancestors, or the pure chaos of our world manifesting into random chance encounters. Just as I had scoured the internet for inspirational quotes, tarot card readings, manifesting channels just to get out of my post-relationship funk, I am now on the road to something better for myself, all in the simplicity of taking things as they come, in taking the moment as it is, and listening to it as I am in the present. Not giving it much thought, but embracing it all nevertheless. The coin on the ground you picked up, that detour on the road you had to take, that meme on your Twitter feed you shared to your friends, that stranger at the bus stop who asked you what time it was. It was there and you made the move to acknowledge it. In doing so, you have proven something exists, that it, and you, are here and you are alive to see it.
Maybe that’s how you came across my page, this blog, these words. Perhaps you are here for a reason? Could it be that my simple act of writing this right now guaranteed that you would also be reading this right now?
This game, life itself, is funny like that. All we can do is enjoy it now as we play our way through, because now is all that is. Now is all we have.
Now, I will sign off. See ya next week!
-M