Control is an illusion because, mostly, we’re acted upon by life rather than the other way around.

This may sound somewhat at odds when it comes to what you’re exploring, including picking yourself to do the art you want to do.

Yet, the reality is we have little control – sometimes none at all – over so many things which surround us every day – the way others drive in our proximity, the way financiers and bankers will savings, how pilots felt today when they got up.  (You get the idea; the list goes on and on.)

It doesn’t matter who we are – even the dictator depends on the citizens of their country being willing to be dictated to.

Here  are five elemental truths identified in rites of passage from childhood to adulthood and which I bring to mind from time to time; they help me to see life in a much more real way:

Life is hard
You are not as important as you think
Life is not about you
You are not in control
You are going to die.

The idea behind these was for a child to be able die upfront and then live more fully, making their contribution to the community.

There are times when we don’t appear to have any control of all, and this is where the recognition of our passions is so critical.  It was in the most uncontrollable environment of the Nazi death camps that Viktor Frankl identified the one thing we can be sure of controlling; he wrote:

‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember
the men who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been
few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human
freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of
circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

Passion is what we have when everything else is taken from us, the things we believe and feel and how we will act.  Perhaps you and I see who we are most essentially when all other illusions of control are taken from us.  If so, it makes sense to participate in infinite games because, it seems to me, we see how we need to connect with others.  We also begin to see how many of our finite games are illusions of control, games we play to make us feel better about our lives.

I dare to suggest that Nassim Taleb’s sceptical empiricist and flaneur would most likely value and enjoy infinite games, and offer us an insight into the usefulness of them.*

Beyond the illusion of control there is the importance of passion, which, when invested in the right ways and places and people, promises to produce a life of creativity, generosity, and enjoyment.

(*A sceptical empiricist is someone who values arriving at a judgement but does not rush to it, exploring and inquiring for as long as possible; it is a tiring occupation because it take so much energy.  A flaneur is strictly an idler, a loafer, but Taleb sees this character appreciating something about the randomness and unpredictability of life that many experts and forecasters do not.  I use flaneur to describe someone who journeys with purpose.)