Start with an Endgame

"Flowers are living things. You always need to be aware of this. You can see flowers burn through their life at such a fast pace. I want to keep up with it. But as I make an arrangement it keeps changing and deforming...like chasing the game of life."

By Azuma Makoto in The New Yorker documentary, “The Japanese Artist Who Sends His Work to Space”

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Dear Alex,

December is burning up petals and patience at pandemic pace.

My American colleagues and I are waiting for the FDA to authorize the vaccine this week. It will take a storehouse colder than the worst winter in Antarctica to preserve the vaccine in its tiny multi-dose vial before another roll of protocol must be followed for immediate use. In extreme cold, not much can survive but the burn of ultra-deep freeze keeps frailty alive in glassware.

I watched the last episode of "The Queen's Gambit" last night after a few hours of delay in my study room. I had been hovering over my board game of an alternate sort, shuffling pens and highlighters across my notebook as if chasing truth trending from my online preparatory course. I needed to study intently to prepare for next October my match, a long didactic exam. I had the endgame in focus.

Our school masters have taught us from day 1 to know our learning goals. It’s the course syllabus, my teen daughter advises me. Know it well as your roadmap to get your A in class. Each topic for exploration within the borders of the curriculum is weighted by a percentage of the final grade. Strategize your time and tactic first to finish well.

Nothing burns our imagination faster than a bad endgame. The conditioning of our mind to crave for honey in our gut is not evolutionary but anti-human. Every newborn emerges from the canal of darkness to the first world with kick and scream, announcing vitality. In decades after a lifetime series of struggling she shall cease to play with us and retreat to the abyss. What happens in between these bookends of darkness looks more like a maze than directives.

And so I find it absurd and tragic that the chess grandmaster in this Netflix mini series, Elizabeth Harmon, smacks us in her endgame with a saccharine success that sucks as a sexy illusion. Harmon versus Russia in the final 1968 Tournament of Champions in Moscow is a protracted stand-up comedy with a missing punchline. Is this how a 20-year-young victor in wig and wit feeds our hunger for a merry Christmas predictable and timed as the decay of vaccine and lilies at room temperature?

Film critics tell us no films this year are expected to budge our views or outcomes on politics, racial disparity or death rates. Yet movies unwind our daily narratives in ceaseless cycling of start and hang, play and post, bloom and burn. There is no endgame worthy of our watching or winning without our willing to first ask ourselves:

Could my next move make me more a better trophy collector - or the bearer of hope born of much burning for immortal you?

Yours, Kate