Mindfulness, Games, and a Rough Two Weeks

It's been a very rough last two weeks at work. Most of my work involves two car accidents with one or two people who've been hurt, with the occasional multi-car or serious accident, but for the last two weeks there's been a flurry of wild four and five car accidents with several people injured in each car. Some of this can be explained by recent bad weather, but in most cases it was just the driver responsible for the accident having an inexplicable lapse of attention. People must have their minds on other things. There is usually a brief run of claims like this in the spring when the weather improves. However, it's much earlier than would be usual for that, and I've never seen so many injuries (many of them serious) in such a short time. Hopefully this is just some weird blip and things will get back to our normal level of overload so I can dig out to some degree.

Some friends of mine occasionally host tournaments of the Magic: The Gathering card game for their friends, and did one this past weekend. I do well enough when we play with our own decks, but for some reason I'm no better than average when we play tournaments. I think I've finally figured out why. Tournament formats level the playing field, in that all of the players are operating with identical size pools of cards. There are some people in our circle of friends who've been playing the game longer than I have, but not many, so my card collection is larger than most of them. I've realized that I've come to rely on deck construction to win rather than actually being able to play the game well, so when the playing field is level, my results aren't very good. The embarrassing thing to admit is that my main problem is a simple lack of paying attention, which leads me back to the Buddhist idea of mindfulness. So not only can I enjoy the games as games, I can also use them as a sort of spiritual exercise by using them to cultivate awareness.

All of this ties together, believe it or not. After an initial period where I was tearing my hair out at work and rushing around, I made a decision to slow down. I didn't feel as though I could afford to do that, but I was finding that I had been rushing to the point where I was making mistakes and actually taking more time because I had to go back and fix things I'd done previously. I found a pace that still seemed to be workable, though it's still going to take at least a few days to bring my desk back to some level of order (assuming the work load goes back to normal, which I don't think I can count on). The key thing here is that it wasn't so much the working pace that mattered; it was more about paying increased attention to what I was doing and ultimately being more efficient.

I'd planned to focus on the concept of Right Speech this past week, but frankly, I've been doing a poor job of it due to stress. I become aware of saying things I probably shouldn't, but the words are coming out even as I realize there's a problem with them. The more aware I am of how/when I'm making mistakes, the more I find. It's funny and ironic that the more aware I become (and in essence the more progress I make), the more I feel like a complete newbie who doesn't know anything.