It occurred to me today that the tower sometimes falls.

If you are unfamiliar with the game Jenga, it starts with a tower that is made out of rectangular blocks that are laid on top of each other, three blocks to a level, in levels that lie perpendicular to those above and below, eighteen levels in all.

Once the tower of fifty-four blocks is built, players take turns removing blocks, judiciously, from the tower, hoping to avoid causing the tower to fall. The player who causes the tower to fall is the loser, obviously.

The game is fun, inasmuch as it is fun to watch the tower fall, especially if someone else is responsible for that oops. Early on in the round, it’s not a terribly difficult thing to do –> to get one of the blocks out of the tower. But, as play progresses, the tower becomes more and more unstable, and it is more and more likely that a person –especially if they have a particularly low level of dexterity– is going to cause it to fall.

This morning, it occurred to me that the game is a metaphor for life, in a few very interesting ways.

* * *

2020 has been a pretty decent year for me; but I feel kind of bad voicing that sentiment out loud. With all of the memes going around that discuss the horrors of 2020 –I literally just spent fifteen minutes looking at 2020 memes; it’s no wonder writing these posts takes me so long, sometimes– and the fact that a lot of people are just clawing and scratching their way to December 31st, hoping for a new start in 2021, there’s a little bit of guilt that goes along with saying to people that I’ve had a great year.

I am in the greatest physical shape of my life, as nearly as I can tell. I ran a half-marathon on October 10th, which I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of this year. I’ve written more than 650 pages of fiction and non-fiction prose since the start of the year, and I have most definitely never done that before. I’ve made some other, minor, positive changes in my life that have contributed to my overall sense of health and well-being.

All of these changes have reminded me of Jenga, inasmuch as the game really is about removing things from a structure and hoping that the thing is still standing when you’re done.

Getting rid of the excuses and making the necessary changes to move myself forward this year was challenging, and I was a little afraid of how some of those changes were going to affect my lifestyle, but the tower is still standing; dare I say that the tower is better off for me having removed some of what was getting in my way.

Of course, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is to say that you can’t go overboard when it comes to making a bunch of changes in your life, and I recognize that. But, I’m also starting to recognize, the older that I get, that I’m not looking down the road at as much ‘remaining time’ as I used to see. It’s time to stop kidding around, for me –and maybe also for you.

No change means no progress.

* * *

As I was discussing the concept for this post with my wife, she reminded me that there was a particularly challenging part of the game of Jenga that I was totally forgetting about. If you are a fan of the game, maybe you noticed it, as well, when I described the game in the opening section.

In Jenga, when you remove a piece from the tower, you have to place it back on top of the tower, which is to say that you are building on top of what it is that you are slowly destroying.

Admittedly, it has been some time since I’ve played the game, so I have to apologize for having left out that little detail. And, as my wife was reminding me of this part of the game, I was already thinking about how that affects my metaphor. If you can imagine the game a little better now, where you remove pieces from underneath to place them on the top, you can see that this ends up becoming a balancing act, of sorts. It’s an additional, challenging part of the game to be sure, stacking the pieces on the top of the tower without causing it to fall over.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of your life as a balancing act, but I’ll bet a lot of people have. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a plate spinning performer before –perhaps at the circus– but I often feel like my life is a constant exercise in trying to keep several spinning plates up in the air, on top of these thin poles, and it’s not as easy as it might sound. Others think of their lives as a tightwire act, where they are really doing their very best to maintain as much balance as possible, in order to avoid falling off the high-wire.

Jenga is as good a metaphor as any for this difficult balancing act that we call life, come to think of it. Removing blocks from the base of the tower to build onto the top of the tower becomes, without great attention to detail, an exercise in improper foundational mechanics. Of course, at the beginning of the game, the fifty-four blocks that you start your tower with are a very solid foundation –perhaps lacking a little width, but otherwise pretty concrete. But, as you go through the process of weakening your foundation, block by block, you are then hoping that what you’re left with is enough to build upon.

Life is a balancing act, to say the least. It’s not nearly as delicate, or dangerous, when you’ve got a firm foundation. The less firm that foundation is, the closer you probably are to a crash.