My neighbor Jim and I get together every week or so in my garage cum art studio to play the Asian strategy game Go. He’s been playing a year or more longer, but I’m starting to get the hand of the game and can give him a kind of challenge.
What makes our games interesting is that despite being neighbors and friends for nearly 30 years, we are completely opposite personalities. He is an aggressive player who starts putting pieces all over the board, hoping his opponent will make a mistake and he’ll be able to connect them up to cover a large area of territory.
I, on the other hand, tend to be conservative and methodical, staking out an area at a time, and securing it before moving on, but being prepared to move away from the area to take advantage of an opportunity if I see it. Needless to say, in the first games he smoked me.
One of the other things we do besides play Go is ruminate—another word for chitchat, by the way—and recently we were discussing our different playing styles and why we seem so locked into them. As I thought about it, I said, “I guess it’s because you are the sum of your experiences.” Don’t ask me where that thought came from, like many of my thoughts, it just popped into my head. But the nice thing about talking with Jim, is when I get these serendipitous thoughts, we talk them out and put meaning to them.
So, what did we conclude from my little homily—and here I do not mean the tedious, moralizing lectures you get after an even more tedious sermon, but a kind of summation of a philosophical fact or situation.
The conclusion we came to is that each of us absorbs beliefs and habits from childhood on that make us who we are, and barring a cataclysmic event in our lives, are fairly fixed. Jim, for instance, is a military brat who went to college right out of high school where he ended up studying accounting. His early after college involved contracting which, believe it or not, involves a lot of ‘throw things up in the air and see where they fall.’
Risk taking became a part of his personality. I, on the other hand, went from a small farm in a small town to 20 years in the army, both of which require a careful, risk management approach and encourage planning ahead. In the army I was also taught to be flexible, that is, have a plan, implement the plan, but be prepared to change the plan to meet changing situations. If you get this, you can see it reflected in our games.
More and more of our games are ending in near draws. He’s still beating me, but not by as much. I attribute this to the fact that his ‘go for broke’ approach is running into my ‘slow and plodding, but occasional unexpected move approach.’ That’s how I grew up, how I was trained, and it’s who I am. Understanding that simple fact helps improve communication. Instead of being frustrated by a person doing something unexpected, or even annoying, if you understand the difference between your background and experience and that person’s, some of the frustration can be mitigated. We usually get angry about things we don’t understand.
You want to know when that is extremely important? When you retire, or as I call it, transition from the bureaucracy to the freedom to work on what you want when you want. You’d be surprised at how many marriages go on the rocks after retirement, because two people who’ve been married for decades, forced now to spend most of every day with each other, find they drive one another crazy. If they had taken to time to get to know each other’s backgrounds, to understand what went into making you ‘you,’ some of the conflict could’ve been avoided.
Whether you’re playing games with the other person, or married to them, it’s important to know where they’re ‘coming from.’ At the same time, don’t forget that there’s two sides to every story. Keep in mind they’re having the same problem with you. – NWI
