Concentration- such an important ingredient for success in anything, but so often lost in this age of smartphones and multi-tasking. Concentration is also the name of a card game that's also called memory, and living up to its name, it requires paying attention to which cards are flipped and remembering their location. Easy game for anyone (even kids!) if you're paying attention, immensely difficult if you're not (even adults!)
The same is kind of true for chess... I played in-person chess this weekend for the first time in a LOT of years, and it gave me some competitive fire back, but also reminded me of how important it is to give the game your undivided attention. one of my biggest regrets about chess is the transition from junior year to senior year, when I was supposed to be at my best, with tons of experience, but I performed worse than previous years because I lost focus. Instead of staying at my seat the entire game and focusing on my own game, my mind started to wander to other people's matches (it was a team game, so eight of our players versus eight of theirs) and then coming back to my own game. This kind of divided attention (一心两用- literally "one heart, used for two different purposes" in Chinese) led to bad decisions in key moments when chess at the high school level is mainly "who makes the first mistake," and I needed all the time I could get to make sure I didn't make one. This lack of concentration was symbolic of my general interests back then as a 17-year-old kid, starting to think about college, movies, other pursuits, and taking for granted that I was good at chess... aka getting complacent. It's the age old story of the cocky kid who thinks he's better than he is, stops working as hard to get to that point (through rugged determination and laser-focused concentration) and falls flat on his face. I still remember my chess coach and high school physics teacher George McGuire oddly prophesizing my diversion of attention span, and I somehow falling flat on my face anyway.
Playing chess this weekend also reminded me how good it felt to be fully immersed in something that I enjoy and valuing something enough to pay full attention to it. In high school chess was such a fun activity for me, and for two hours each game day I'd sit down and play a match with a competitor, and on some Saturdays it'd be 4 matches in one day (potentially a total of 8 hours playing chess!) That's nearly unthinkable nowadays, but back then I could block it all out, the stress of the week, homework, social anxiety, the news cycle, my latest acne outbreak, etc., etc. to focus entirely on the task at hand of winning my chess game, and I enjoyed it; I still look back on those days fondly. I don't think I've concentrated as much on something like I did those chess games, with possible exceptions of intense dodgeball games, SAT and LSAT tests, Jeopardy episodes. No looking at the phone, no looking around to see the scenery, no earphones pumping in music or some podcast. It's a cathartic experience after such an intense experience, and I always feel like I've gone through some sort of warp field where nothing else mattered and I forgot about everything else, and it takes a minute afterwards to regain a sense of reality. It's an intoxicating feeling and I'd like to recreate it as much as I can.
Playing this weekend also made me realize that there can be a lot of enjoyment without winning. Feels cliche to say, but I was always dragged down by the need to win at all costs, that I didn't take a second to realize how fun the other experiences of playing chess were, like hanging out with my teammates after the game, the movement of the pieces, the pressure of the clock (we used analog clocks back then that you had to push down a knob after a move to stop your clock and start the opponent's clock to start moving), and just the idea that I could be playing a strategy game to improve myself in a sort of strategic artistic expression. I read a WSJ article naming dance as one of the things people do that have the least practical value but the most artistic value, which is not entirely true about dance (I feel like it has a great exercise and recreational value), but if art is art because there's no value in it, it's the act of doing it that is the art itself, then playing chess also has that quality of not having much practical value but being an art in itself.
I don't know, kind of a clumsy way of explaining the art of chess. Maybe I needed to concentrate more about what that article was saying.
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