@@ -3,21 +3,21 @@ High Anxiety The other night, a good friend was visiting and she suggested we pass the time playing [Go](http://bit.ly/hbUQr "Go (game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"). I own a board, but I don't recall ever playing with it. We got the board out and she started to explain how to play. I love games, so you would expect that we had a good time. But no, I fell into a blue funk and things went rapidly downhill. I do not kid when I say that by the time she ended the game in exasperation, I had sucked all the joy out of the room. -My involvement with Go has been sporadic and inauspicious. I had heard it was a beautiful game, full of subtleties and marvels. Friends told me how much I would love it. Decades ago, I visited a [club](http://senseis.xmp.net/?TorontoGoClub "Sensei's Library: Toronto Go club") and explained I would like to learn to play. One of the members pulled out a small board, gave me a brief run-down of the rules, and invited me to play. He probably gave me a large handicap, I don't remember the details. +My involvement with Go has been sporadic and inauspicious. I had heard it was a beautiful game, full of subtleties and marvels. Friends told me how much I would love it. Decades ago, I visited a [club](http://senseis.xmp.net/?TorontoGoClub "Sensei's Library: Toronto Go club") and explained I would like to learn to play. One of the members pulled out a small board, gave me a brief run-down of the rules, and invited me to play. He probably gave me a large handicap, I don't remember the details. I had no idea what I was doing, and he destroyed me. (If you understand the mind that would take losing the first game ever played against an aficionado so [personally](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-01/optimism.md "Optimism"), you can probably stop reading right here.) -I had no idea what I was doing, and he destroyed me. Read what I just wrote, and if you understand the mind that would take it [personally](http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-05-01/optimism.md "Optimism") enough to consider himself destroyed, you can probably stop reading right here. You know it all. +I'm sure he was a very nice man who wanted to share his love of the game with me. I do not think he wanted to "destroy" me, he was probably just showing me the natural consequences of actions and reactions in Go, consequences that happened to lead to his armies surrounding nearly all the free territory on the board. He suggested I watch some of the other members play and learn from them. I watched, bewildered. I was unable to learn a thing. I have a good memory for certain kinds of games, a good memory for tactics and strategies, for how things play out. But I remember nothing of my game or the games I watched. In Go, it seems that things are very subtle. A player plays here, and her opponent, realizing how things will play out if he responds directly, elects to play a stone in another sector of the board entirely. Without any commentary to guide me, I had no idea what I was seeing. I did not see wonders and marvels, instead I felt like a blind man in an art gallery. I could hear sharp intakes of breath, gasps of astonishment, and excited whispers, but I could not directly perceive the art. -I went out and bought a book on Go, a book for beginners. I read it cover to cover and I was still blind. +Again, I don't think anyone at the club was trying to exclude me. It's just that they spoke a foreign language and for that matter, they were talking about something with no direct parallel to anything else I had ever seen. I have been told that everyone is deaf, dumb, and blind in Go when they start. I have been told that it is always unfathomable when first encountered. I didn't know that and I assumed that I was defective in some way, that *I* was blind rather than assuming that a game played by two experienced players would be too subtle for a newcomer to grasp. -I didn't try playing Go again for years after that. The next time I can remember even talking about Go was with someone I intensely disliked, a person with absolutely no moral centre and a strong interest in being the alpha male of his social group. He made it perfectly clear that he thought he was a good Go player, and invited me to play with him. I found a way to sidle out of that, I had no interest in submitting to him in that manner. Read that line and again you understand a great deal about the baggage I was dragging up to the board. +I went out and bought a book on Go, a book for beginners. I read it cover to cover, but I still felt blind. The game seemed out of reach. I have learned many games before and since, and usually there is something I can grasp right away. backgammon appears to be a race at first glance. Later, you learn more about blocking and timing and back games and blitzes and you appreciate that it is rarely just a race. Most other games are similar, there is some obvious thing you are trying to do, and the subtleties come later. Go didn't give me anything so obvious to understand. -There was one more chapter in my interest in Go a few years back. Another person I liked wanted to learn to play so I decided I would learn as well. This time I bought a computer game that promised some instruction. I tried playing along, but there were difficulties with my relationship with my friend and I quickly lost interest. +I didn't try playing Go again for years. When friends brought up the game, I changed the subject. I got into Japanese Maples and Koi keeping, yet avoided Go. Then I moved house, and in sorting through my games I pulled out a Go board. i can't even remember buying it. My friend suggested we play, and last night I made another attempt to learn the game. -So last night I sat down for the fourth chapter in my attempt to learn the game. I felt a great deal of anxiety. My friend tried to show me the rules. She would put some stones on the board to explain something, and I would ask a lot of questions, disrupting the flow of her instruction. I was impatient, edgy. Every time she showed me something, I would focus on what she wasn't telling me, afraid that I would miss some critical detail. I'm sure it was frustrating for me to continually ask questions about things she would have demonstrated in a moment had I been patient. +I felt a great deal of anxiety. My friend tried to show me the rules. She would put some stones on the board to explain something, and I would ask a lot of questions, disrupting the flow of her instruction. I was impatient, edgy. Every time she showed me something, I would focus on what she wasn't telling me, afraid that I would miss some critical detail. I'm sure it was frustrating for me to continually ask questions about things she would have demonstrated in a moment had I been patient. As someone who knows me well and is a keen observer of human nature, she was troubled by how much angst I was obviously experiencing, how much trouble I was having with being incompetent. My word, "incompetent." She doesn't use words like that to describe trying to play maybe the second game in my life. @@ -37,7 +37,9 @@ Try something, she encouraged. Succeed, fail, it doesn't matter. Try something a And I was extremely uncomfortable with having no idea. I feared a non-existent humiliation of playing randomly. She was not playing me for the pleasure of pointing her finger at me and crying "Shame!" Nevertheless, my world was filled with fear of being shamed for incompetence. Eventually, I placed a stone on the board. I think at that point the fear of her disapproval over my diffidence exceeded the fear of making a mistake. -We continued to play. With each stone, I re-enacted that awful feeling of staring at the board and having no idea what to do, no idea why to do it. I tried playing aggressively, she quickly captured one of my stones, punishing me for my mistake. With the loss of my stone, her position suddenly seemed to fill the board with weight and menace. My own seemed inconsequential, consisting of a few stones haphazardly strewn about. I fell deeper into despair. +We continued to play. With each stone, I re-enacted that awful feeling of staring at the board and having no idea what to do, no idea why to do it. I tried playing aggressively, and she quickly captured one of my stones. This depressed me. Of course, she meant me no ill will, but in my dark mood I felt I had been punished by fate for making a mistake. + +With the loss of my stone, her position suddenly seemed to fill the board with weight and menace. My own seemed inconsequential, consisting of a few stones haphazardly strewn about. I fell deeper into despair. Instead of being motivated by the joy of learning something new, I was motivated by the fear of further punishment and humiliation. Watching my agonies was painful for my friend. She was empathizing with my pain as I stared at the board hurting and wishing the ordeal was over. And to boot, I was unable to interact with her. Scotch sat at my elbow, ignored. She sat across from me, ignored. Was there music playing? I can't remember. My world shrunk to this nine by nine board full of the pain of my helplessness. 2009-10-20/high_anxiety.md bf4cc09e28ca79a2f6183eba3c9a6ddc6f5bb35a Reginald Braithwaite raganwald@gmail.com http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/commit/9ccb3f2fe2576ac6ef4e58edcfd36887f1750829 9ccb3f2fe2576ac6ef4e58edcfd36887f1750829 2009-10-22T12:22:26-07:00 2009-10-22T12:22:26-07:00 edited the middle out 80bc166faa657e6f7ded376e933995a0f5a14e0e Reginald Braithwaite raganwald@gmail.com