Living in the moment

Back in August I wrote about living in the moment. I was inspired to write by my experience of playing backgammon while on holiday with my partner, Tony, in Scotland. This piece prompted all sorts of comments, many to do with the game of backgammon.

There are all sorts of gems in Louis de Bernieres’ excellent book Birds without wings. It’s set in a town on the south coast of Turkey in the early years of the 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire is crumbling and Turkey is slipping into civil war. De Bernieres has some wonderful observations about the rise of nationalism, and about religion, in what is a gripping, but tragic story. He writes about the two gendarmes who play backgammon all day every day in the village square. He says “Backgammon is a game in which the first half consists of skill, and the second half of luck, so it appeals to both the cunning and the reckless, but it is always skill that wins.” My point was that in backgammon, you can’t decide what you are going to do until you’ve thrown the dice. We could avoid much unnecessary heartache if we lived life like this. We can, and should plan. This is like the skill of setting up the pieces in a game of backgammon to put yourself in the most advantageous position. But there is a limit to how much planning we can do. So much of life depends on things which are outside our control. Ultimately we always have to see how the dice fall before we work out what to do next.