Life is not like a box of chocolates. A box of chocolates is something you give your mother, and she pretends to like the cream-filled ones while secretly discarding those and wishing you had just purchased a box of dark chocolate chews. A box of chocolates is something finite, containing a fixed quantity of goods, the preferred and the less savory.
Life is not a process of eating chocolates, some of which you adore and some of which you hate, until they are gone and you are dead. Life, instead, is like a game of Scrabble.
I’m sure I need not remind you that, in Scrabble, one is dealt a hand of seven tiles. This admittedly is a paltry number compared to the average box of chocolates, but it is only the beginning. With each round, one replenishes the tiles, allowing for new and surprising combinations and potentialities.
As in life, one might be dealt a real bummer of a hand. You may have a glut of vowels, reminiscent of the lyrics to Moana. You may be chronically besieged by consonants, which is really only helpful if you are playing in the Ubyx or Abkhaz language. Both of these language names would make great Scrabble words were they not proper nouns. So, bummer again.
As with chocolates, one is dealt a certain hand. However, unlike with chocolates, one can use them in savvy and unexpected ways. If you are glutted with consonants, you can locate an unclaimed vowel on the board and thus free yourself of your Ubyx burden. A dip into the bag of tiles may yield new possibilities for reinvention. You need not forever be stranded in the desert of vowel-deprivation.
This seems to me a much more apt analogy for human existence. We are dealt a hand, or roster of tiles, and very often it sucks. However, life provides opportunities to ditch the suckier tiles, and garner new ones. They may not always be an improvement, but at least they are different from the old sucky ones. Then, of course, you have your double and triple letter and word spaces. Here we have a perfect analogy for the concept of maximizing one’s potential. You’ve got an H? Used in the right place with the right combination of letters, you can make a killing. You’ve got a talent for making crepes? Applied in the right place with the right combination of market and other forces, and you can make a killing. See what I mean?
It is true that, as in life, some of us just keep getting the wrong combination of letters. Your hand keeps looking like a first grader’s exercise in repetitively writing the letters I and O. You start the game with a Q and with horror soon observe that all the Us and both blank tiles have been played and are inaccessible. It’s really enough, sometimes, to make one want to throw one’s tiles right back in.
Which you can actually do! This is the beautiful thing about the game: it anticipates the sort of existential despair that many of us feel at some point in our lives. The option of returning one’s tiles to the bag, albeit with the penalty of losing one’s turn, is akin to James Hillman’s notion of the suicidal urge as a desire for something wholly different, a ”dying to,” in the service of transformation. What an exhilarating possibility: to be able to completely reinvent oneself, escape the confines by which one has until now been defined.
Of course, the much-anticipated new round of tiles may not be significantly better than the old ones. But at least you only lose your turn rather than your life.
One’s success at Scrabble is intimately connected to the play of other contestants. While players are competitive, their moves can also unwittingly open new ground: a corner of the board that has been yet uncharted, a potentially perfect word opportunity. This seems to me analogous to the interconnected nature of our world. In the mid-late 20th Century, lots of East Coast tech companies migrated to Silicon Valley, where innovative marketing of technology skyrocketed the economic value of the region. Of course, a player, or business owner, who breaks new ground can also derail possibilities for her fellow players, or fellow inhabitants of the world. Good luck buying a house in Silicon Valley for under a million.
There are, of course, some ways in which Scrabble does not exactly mirror real life. There are a few tiles than cannot be easily ditched. For example, one’s parents and children are fairly fixed tiles and cannot easily be returned to the bag for replacements. There are certain aspects of one’s body and mind that are relatively immutable, although everyone knows that innate ability is not necessary to achieve a high level of skill at Scrabble, just as it is not required for success in life.
Finally, the well-played Scrabble board documents the trials, disappointments, and triumphs of a community of people who have gone at it for a period of hours. There you see the embarrassment of TIP, during a difficult period; over here is the rather brilliant (you dare say) coup of fitting FORAY into a triple word corner; further on is your opponent’s fortuitous play of GEESE, which allowed you to rid yourself of your remaining letters. The Scrabble board, like life, documents the plays of which we are proud and those we would like to forget, the hardships and the successes. The evidence is clear and enduring, just as are the legacies we leave on this planet. And although it is true that my dog once consumed a Z tile, in general, we cannot eat our legacies.
