Women with HD...is it true or just situational?

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

Crikey. Remind me never to play chess with you Captain. Your thinking is always 4 moves ahead!!!

Chess, good choice of metaphors.

In the game of chess (like the game of "love"), I can teach you all the moves of the various pieces, when those pieces can be moved (or can't), and the ultimate goal of the game.

As humans, we think because we know the "rules," we understand, whether it be chess or love. However, if you have more than a passing interest in the game and the rules of chess, you know that it is not enough and that there is some basic strategy and tactics required to get from a starting point to some endpoint (e.g., to win the game).

I would never say that I was really "good" at chess. I got better the more I played. But the thing I noticed was that the more I played, the deeper the game unfolded before me. It went from a series of moves following some basic strategy to seeing the board and the pieces at a completely different way. Metaphorically speaking, I became the board and the pieces.

You are correct in one sense...I do see moves ahead in chess and in life. Although that "thinking a certain number of moves ahead" looks like "do the following four moves in this order and this sequence to obtain the desired outcome," it really does not occur that way for me. Rather there is a certain Merlin effect for me...seeing the world (or the outcome) looking from the future to the present (and the past) to see what steps would have to occur to reach that desired future as if the future has already occurred.

So, in essence, thinking four moves ahead is really (for me at least) the vision of a future and looking "back in time" asking and noting what would have had to happen (moving backward from the future to the present) to produce that future outcome.

It is not an easy thing to explain because it does not seem to be the way we are wired or trained to think. For me, it is and has always been a natural way of looking at things. And in that is the nature of my prescience. The same is true (perhaps to an even greater extent) for my son. It is immediately recognizable (to me) that he processes that way (perhaps because, as his dad, I protected that and did not crush nor allow the world to crush down that way of seeing the world).

In that way, it's not the future that we are trying to create that is uncertain, it is the present. Looking from the future, like standing on a summit peak, the endpoint looks fixed (there is only one peak, one summit, everything else in the immediate proximity is downhill and there are multiple points downhill from the summit). It is the "present" that wriggles around and has all the uncertainty and may require lots of course correction to "reach the summit."

Does that make any sense whatsoever?

Back to the chess metaphor, one way of looking at the problem is that my wife has taken all the pieces away from me except the king, a pawn, a knight and maybe a rook and then challenged me to keep playing the game as if everything is okay or, to put it another way, to live up to loving unconditionally.

At what point do I resign? Or take my pieces and board and go elsewhere. Sometimes you have to surrender to win.

Ironically, there are two quotes that grace my journals from 1984 to 1986 when I was going through the separation and divorce from my first wife after I discovered, and she ultimately revealed, her affair (I literally titled them the Journey and Journals of a Discarded Husband). Although I had come across them much earlier they seemed very relevant then and now. I have never forgotten them because I knew them at the level of my soul the moment I read them.

“To love someone unconditionally is to not care who they are or what they do. Unconditional love, on the surface, looks the same as indifference.”

“Unconditional love is no more a force in spacetime than it is in chess, or soccer or ice hockey. Rules define life in games and unconditional love doesn’t recognize rules.”

Time to initiate a short sleep cycle.

The Captain