Remember that kid’s game, Snakes and Ladders? I loved it. You’d roll the dice while facing a square board. The board was filled with 100 squares and various lengths of snakes and ladders. Winning literally depended on a roll of the dice.
Landing at the base of a ladder and you flew up to the next level. If the die went against your favor, you would land on a snake’s tail and zip, down you went in fortune and progress in the game.
Seems to me life isn’t much different from the game of Snakes and Ladders. First of all, we must elect to play the game. Most of us start out at square one. As we gather momentum and move forward in life, we may get the occasional boost that boosts us along more quickly. An unexpected new job. A promotion at the job. A degree you’ve worked hard for. A certificate that allows you to take on more responsibility at work and earn more income.
But there are also plenty of snakes. A failed course or program that delays or upends your educational aspirations. Breaking up with your first girlfriend or boyfriend. A job or promotion that didn’t come through as expected. Always leaving the question: what do I do now?
The game of Snakes and Ladders is fun. In a controlled way, children experience the emotional ups and downs as a harmless precursor to the real snakes and ladders of life. Both can be stressful and disorienting.
I remember how surprising it was to learn about “positive stressors.” Happy news can negatively impact our emotional well-being as much as “negative stressors.” Anything that upends our balance and pushes us out our comfort zone requires adjustment. I am always intrigued by the stories of lottery winners who burn through their winnings in short order and end up unhappy and destitute again.
Change that happens too quickly in either direction is impactful. Life is full of snakes we learn, sadly. The need to pull into ourselves and avoid them gets stronger the more we learn. The trouble is, they are so hard to spot. They look like regular people.
No wonder we prefer the certainty and structure of parlour games. Many life situations afford us a measure of certainty and structure, too. Marriage. Tenured jobs and other life positions. A new house. But just like Snakes and Ladders, we all know even those situations are rife with their own fair share of opportunities and stressors.
If we’re lucky, we learn to feint and parry as we play the game of life. We rise to occasions when we are called to do so. We duck and cover to avoid the setbacks and learn to work around the obstacles, especially the human ones.
There are an unfortunate number and variety of human snakes out there to complicate our path. Our task is to learn to avoid them. If we can’t avoid them, we need to gird ourselves with doses of socially acceptable anti-venom until we can avoid their toxicity.
Above all, the choice is on us not to become snakes ourselves. Fortunately, they live way too low to the ground for most good people to generate any interest in following their example.
Expressive Compulsive 