Avanthika Balaji
Grade 12, Our Own English High School, Dubai
Dubai: Do you see life as a checkered game of chess with infinite possibilities to break into a win or stumble and loose?
In life, as in chess, forethought wins.
A chess game is like a highly simplified version of our everyday life spread on a checkered board with 64 squares that resonates a battle field in action. Every one of your decisions will have consequences for the future. We know that each move we make, in life or in a game, brings forth a fresh path for the future.
In both chess and life, the choices before us are in practice infinite. However, in chess the results of your moves are obvious relatively quickly, because the game has an end, in which you will win, lose or draw. In this, chess is like a story where we are the authors of our destinations.
Often, in a game of chess you end up making the wrong moves and suffer the consequences a good number of times before you learn from your mistakes and gradually take the high road of excellence, just as in life, we learn to embrace challenges, to get up when we fall because every one of your mistake will teach you a lesson that makes you even sturdier than you already are.
One of the hardest things about life is to be able to remember to practice what you’ve learned for it takes a moment to fall into the hands of temptation, frustration or hardship.
You only know what the next move is. You play for the present, trying to construct the best possible configuration of moves that you anticipate for your future, knowing well that it is impossible to predict the situation even two moves later. You simply cannot get fooled into thinking that you can control the future. One tricky move can steer the wheels of life in a direction that is least anticipated by you.
Move in silence; only speak when it’s time to say checkmate.
