Fun and games

Last week has loomed large in my calendar as a week when I was not going to be able to fulfill a wide variety of expectations globally (there were a variety of things people wanted from me in several different countries simultaneously, and I was going to disappoint them all and stay in New Zealand). I didn’t know how badly that would go, but somehow it ended up worse than I expected. That has kept me quiet and dealing with things around the world; the challenge I have found was to focus on the life I have here rather than the lives I don’t have here.

Because I stayed here for the winter holiday rather than heading overseas to one of the many important things calling me, I have been trying to squeeze my joy out of this at-home life. The kids have been home all week, and I’ve been doing some combination of trying to create work here, doing some work here, and dealing with things overseas. But more than anything I’ve tried to give myself permission to really hang out with these children, spend time with them, play games with them, and watch them together.

We’re cocooned in the cold weather. Many days it has been brilliantly beautiful, but it has often been quite stormy, and it’s as cold as it gets here (frost on the shaded valleys as I pass them on the train, mist rising as soon as the hot sun hits and melts the frost). Mostly the kids haven’t had friends over, either. Mostly it’s been just the three of us in the house. Ah, and we have been having glorious fun!

Perhaps the most fun, with the three of us in this TV-free, wintery house, has been the playing of games. Now, I get that we are not actually pioneers exploring the new world—we have sofas and electric blankets and double ovens. But there is something about the incredible low-tech experience of playing card games and board games that helps me be connected back through time to the parts of human history when so many things weren’t mediated by something that takes batteries or plugs in.

There are many things I love about these games. One of the most exciting is watching the way it has changed Naomi’s relationship to winning. For years, we have known that games are a tricky issue for Naomi. If she wins—which she very often does, no matter who she plays against or how hard that person tries—she is cheerful and pleasant, and the game-playing is enjoyable for all. If she loses, or if it looks like she will lose, she gets clipped and tight, and it goes downhill from there. This—plus the fact that Aidan wasn’t old enough for many games—has made game playing relatively rare in our house. This is all changing.

We have discovered the game “set” which is a joy—everyone can play, it’s good for the brain, and it’s super fun. But the pattern of Naomi’s continued, and that made the experience pretty unfun. We tried modifying the rules to play in pairs and still it was tricky. So we instituted a new rule—if Naomi began to forget that the game was a thing to be enjoyed and not to be won, the game was over. One warning and then the cards went away for a while. I had no idea whether this would work or whether we’d just be giving up the games, but somehow it has worked (it makes me wonder why I didn’t try it sooner—so simple a solution!). It isn’t just that Naomi is being threatened; she is really trying to find her way to a new relationship to winning. She has come to see that it is more fun for us all to enjoy the game than for one of us to beat the others.

Now both children work to modify the rules of games so that there is a way the family can win, rather than an individual winning. We say we don’t keep score—and we really don’t (for years we have tried to get Naomi not to keep score, but she’d keep it in her head anyway). We have found ways to be collaborative that are not simply the obnoxious, liberal-parent ways of softening the blow of losing, but are creative and thoughtful ways to set goals for us to work together. In many ways, this drive to make new rules that contain goals we can jointly achieve or not is the same energy that pushes Naomi to be competitive in the first place, but here it does not rest on the particular outcome of a game—whether we achieve the goals set or not, Naomi remains cheerful about it.

This has raised so many questions for me about the power of competition, the power of collaboration, and the connections between the two. I have often been called into executive groups where the drive of individual members was hurting the performance of the entire team. Competition wipes out collaboration as a more common and more powerful force. And in organisations, we do not take the cards away from the people who are being damagingly competitive—we tend to complain about them and then give them bonuses. i look at where we are as a species right now, and I think it’s clear that most of the things countries do to win—whether it’s a war or an arms race or a speed-of-development race—are key factors in the entire collective of the planet losing. I keep wondering how we can channel the hard-wired competitive nature of humanity into the softer-wired collaborative nature of humanity and then expand the boundaries of who we’re collaborative with, who counts as our tribe, our people, our family.

Helping Naomi acquire a new relationship to these ideas has been hard but possible. Aidan seems fairly naturally collaborative (although still competitive against rival soccer teams). Now we just have to work on the rest of the world. Decks of cards all around…

(Pictures today are of Aidan’s bowling birthday party which was both heaps of fun and also a reminder that we live around the world from our families. It’s been that kind of week. And speaking of competitive, you should see Michael bowl! Ah, the hidden talents of the kiwibergers...)