Life on board

“Advise me, please,” I say in the manner of speech we use to start the game.

            Before me, a blank wooden board, a battlefield for me to reach an achievement. Beside me, the ammunition, a pile of black stones heaped in a brown wooden box. Opposite me, my opponent, my equal, with his white ones in this war of wits. The circumstances are nothing new: I have been playing “Go”, a Chinese board game played on an array of nineteen-by-nineteen squares, for many years now. Like the game of life itself, it starts in emptiness and radiates from a single point I choose outward to uncertainty. Though I play as if I am certain what the outcome will be.

            I remove a black stone from the heap and confidently slam it down at a big black point near one corner of the board. “Tik,” sounds the stone, starting the game. The atmosphere is cold: the eyes of countless friends and strangers looking on the board to witness the significant result. Exhausted from too much thinking, confused and dazed by messy clusters of white and black pieces in unfamiliar formations, I continued the play for an hour. My play and my opponent’s are dictated by the ticking of a clock. Time flies by in this final round, success demanding that I play the game several moves ahead in my head, anticipating his move, then mine, then his, then mine. No room, no time for error. I grab a stone and plunk it down . . .

            Each game of “Go” is like a little life, compelling me to find solution in an apparent mess, teaching me to make reasoned decisions for the real world. “Go” has taught me to take seriously the challenges that lie ahead. It has prepped me to factor in life’s little triumphs as well as life’s many troubles.

. . . “Thank you for your advice,” I say in the manner we use to end the game.

I rise from the table among sound of grabbing hand. However, life presents us with one challenge after another. Now I am playing the role of “Thai scholar.” In this game, too, I stare across a blank board into an uncertain future at life’s infinite possibilities. Others have played the game quite successfully before me. Some others assure me that I am just as capable as they.  I think so. I hope so.

I have made my first move: I’ve come to America, studied in a new world, learned to read and write and speak a new language, set in motion a game whose outcome I designed and will continue to design for the next several years. Armed with this knowledge, I am ready to make my next move, to go to college, to study mathematics under new and more challenging circumstances. So I walk confidently on this adventurous road to seek my destiny as a Royal Thai Scholar to play the game as well as I can and so serve my duty to my king, to his people, and to my country.