My wife Barbara and I began playing Scrabble together shortly after we moved into our home, almost 20 years ago now. Everything was new: our marriage, our living space and finding many different ways to interact in our shared 24/7 venue. Scrabble was a light diversion, and for a while, a pleasant novelty. We also played Boggle, a word game where you’re given 10 or so random letters and each player makes as many words as possible from them.
Both games went by the wayside after our first couple of years. Boggle, in fact, outlasted Scrabble.
I began to get impatient with Scrabble. Barbara had a quicker mind than me, and she usually beat me. After a while, it began to feel humiliating, being up against my own obvious limits. At a certain point, we put the game away, and didn’t get it out again for 15 years or so.
Taking a long break
As you may know, if you’re married, or even if you’re engaged in any long-term commitment—to a job, an artistic calling, a spiritual discipline—things change, slowly, often unnoticeably. You wake up one day and find yourself in new territory. Looking back, you realize it was, in fact, not a sudden thing, but rather, had been proceeding quietly for a while.
So, one evening a month or two ago, we’d finished dinner and an episode each of our current streaming series, the comedy Young Sheldon and the dystopian fantasy Station Eleven. It was a weekend night, and while I often tire fairly early on weeknights and go up to bed, on this occasion I still felt strong.
“Want to play Scrabble?” I asked Barbara. She immediately nodded. I got the game out of the cupboard and we set it up, feeling like we were renewing an old friendship. The first couple of games, as in our original series, held our interest because of the novelty of exploring the world of words this way, once again, after so long.
Then, one night, I suddenly remembered why I’d wanted to stop. Turn after turn, I pulled all vowels or all consonants, or something nearly as impossible. I felt like I’d fallen into a black hole. Eventually, I recovered, but soon after, Barbara informed me she’d fallen into the same kind of predicament.
Then there was the configuration of our game that evening. The played words were concentrated in one area of the board, and there were very few openings for new words of any kind, let alone for long creative strings of letters forming the kinds of interesting contributions that make the game fun.
“Want to cash in our letters and start again?” Barbara asked, after a while.
I found myself having an interesting internal response to that. I’ve long been an impatient Scrabble player, and would once have jumped at such a suggestion. Instead, I found myself thinking, “I’ve been running from difficult situations, from boredom, from ennui, all my life. It’s time I began to persevere in the midst of such things, and just weather them!”
I found the words to say that, but Barbara was somewhat adamant. For a moment, it seemed a quarrel might begin. I explained how my request to keep going was kind of a breakthrough for me. She understood and said OK to finishing the game—even though she told me later that her own inner situation was the opposite of mine: she always tended to persevere, and making a clean break and starting over would have been new behavior for her. She gave up and gave in to my wish, something each marriage partner obviously needs to do sometimes.
“Vipassana Scrabble”
That “fateful” game was several weeks ago. We’ve continued to play, most often on weekends, but occasionally, during the week as well. And it seems we’re coming to a mutual understanding that this game is actually a spiritual discipline!
I once did a Vipassana meditation retreat for three weeks. As they were orienting us, the teachers, a renowned crew including Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfeld and Sharon Salzberg, shared a general preview of what might be in store for us.
The first couple of days would be a learning curve. It would take that long for our minds to get accustomed to shining their searchlights within, noticing thoughts and feelings, and then returning to the simple practice of watching the breath. After that, we’d likely go through some periods of intense inspiration. We’d be overjoyed and think, “It’s working!” We might even, at some point, feel ourselves to be on the very cusp of Enlightenment.
There would also, they told us, be periods of despair, sadness, boredom, sleepiness, lust—basically, anything! And like the more pleasant times, the difficult states, too, we’d discover, were temporary. We learned to label: “joy, arising and passing away,” or “boredom (or sleepiness, which in Vipassana language is “sloth and torpor”) arising and passing away,” and continue.
Playing with a new attitude
Last night’s Scrabble was a bit like that. Also, a bit like that junior high game in which two people go into a closet together for half an hour, and experience “30 Minutes of Heaven or Hell,” depending on, well, a lot of things.
Scrabble is exactly like our lives, with runs of good fortune, talent, genius or “whatever,” and periods when it feels like you don’t have a pot to pee in.
Near the beginning of our game, I got 53 points in one turn, with the “k” in “wink” on a triple-word space, and the “w” on a double-letter space. It was a heady feeling, and promoted a sense of well-being and competence.
That was followed by less spectacular, but quite respectable double-word scores for “pact” and “rivet.” I felt like a veritable Magician! Meanwhile, Barbara was pulling all vowels. I tried hard not to gloat, to assure her that I’d been there.
Then—of course—the tide turned. Barbara didn’t have turns with huge scores this time—in our previous game, she’d used all her letters on an early turn, for 74 points—but she consistently made use of what she had, and in fact, overtook me at the end of the game.
Meanwhile, I coped for some time with the void state, when the best I could make was a word like “good” with no special bonus spaces.
We were both realizing that Scrabble is exactly like our lives, with runs of good fortune, talent, genius or “whatever,” and periods when it feels like you don’t have a pot to pee in. Last night, we both felt, was not a really fun game, like the night before. But we both felt we were seeing that this is a meditation on the same issues we face in our lives. It’s an opportunity learn perseverance, patience and mindfulness. We try to keep reminding one another of that.
I’d thought, the night before, that I was detecting a pattern: with our more frequent practice playing the game, both our scores were going up. I’d once looked up “What is considered a good score in Scrabble?” and I think it said something like 350 points. We were both up to around 320 two nights ago, and I was kind of jazzed to believe that we were actually learning to be better players!
But last night’s scores were back in the 200s. So there was not even that to get off on.
We’ll see what the future holds. Undoubtedly, more of “this too will pass.”
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image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Max Reif
