DELUSIONS OF PROFICIENCY

When I was four years old, my father showed me how to play chess. He taught me all the names of the pieces and how each of them moved and occasionally he would play with me. I really liked chess and wanted to play it all the time. So in grade school, whenever there was an opportunity, I would play chess with the other grade schoolers and I would always win. I got the idea that I was a really great chess player and I was able to maintain this idea until 7th grade. That year, we moved to Sioux City, Iowa. One of my new little friends invited me to a sleep over. He had a chess board and that evening I convinced him to play with me. I was certain that I would win because I’d always won before, but he beat me. It was disturbing. I was sure that it must have been a fluke, so I made him play me two more times that night and he beat me again and again. It turned out that he had been in a chess club in grade school and they had been taught some elementary strategies – strategies far superior to my own. After a while, I picked up some of these strategies and was able to beat him about half the time, but I suspect that he was still a bit better than I was. We moved again and later in high school the idea of playing chess occurred to some of us. I was once again able to beat my friends nearly all of the time and once again I began to think that I was a pretty good chess player. As a freshman in college, I saw some guys playing chess in the dorm lobby. I asked if I could play the winner. They didn’t know me, but they reluctantly agreed. He beat me in three moves. I later discovered that the strategy he used against me is easily defended against and is only useful when one wants to quickly dismiss an idiot who doesn’t know how to play chess. Later on, at a different college, a friend of mine and I (both unskilled chess players) decided to learn the game from each other by playing daily over lunch. It was very enjoyable and while we may not have learned that much about chess, we started noticing that chess is a lot like life. One day my friend observed after losing a game that, as with life, at the beginning the options and possibilities for success are practically limitless but with each move those options decrease considerably down and down until there is only one move left and then it’s over. It may be worth mentioning that my game improved to the point that I tended to beat everyone at school that I came across and again I began to became rather smug about my skills that is until I played my wife’s uncle Steve (who has a chess federation rating). Playing chess with him was as if I didn’t even know how to play the game. I felt like I’d been spun around blindfolded, given a piece of chalk, and told to solve the calculus problems on the board. The fact that I don’t understand calculus didn’t even enter my mind. I didn’t even know where the board was. I bring all this up because life is like chess and in my life I have occasionally felt full of myself and thought that I was a rather proficient player only to find out later that I really didn’t know what I was doing. As with chess, life has multitudinous levels of competency. I’m a rather unskilled chess player and I suspect that I’m a rather unskilled liver as well. In the book of Proverbs, the Hebrew word for “wisdom” is “hokmah” (or something like that). Typically, this word had to do with the skill of artisans and professionals – relating to their knowledge, experience, and efficiency in their areas of expertise. Thus, the word “wisdom” in Proverbs has to do with expertise in the art of living and the wise are those who demonstrate outstanding knowledge, experience, and efficiency in this art. I am not any more a wise man than I am a skilled chess player, but I’m working on it.