metaphoricallove

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre. – Blaise Pascal

When you don’t control the words, and the words don’t control you -

you are experiencing a stalemate with The Creator.

A few years ago, my hyper-fixation on chess gained its resurgence (courtesy of the pandemic, and one too many aspirational Netflix shows). It’s a neat little game, with many moving parts. If you aren’t careful, you may find yourself spending more time getting lost in theory than in practice – and where’s the fun in that?

Nevertheless….

One of my favourite chess concepts is that of the stalemate. So let’s talk about it.

In essence, a stalemate is the game telling you that you cannot force someone to move into their own death (a deceptively benevolent offering from an otherwise ruthless environment).

To me, the stalemate has always been the ultimate mercy call masquerading as constraint; a reminder that even in a world built on force, not everything can be compelled.

So what does one do, when faced with such an outcome?

To be honest with you, my dearest friend: I do not know.

There are moments when the sentence refuses to move – the ideas don’t block me, but they do hold me into stillness. I cannot abandon them any more than they can provide me meaning, and yet….

we stay with one another, the words and I, circling the same quiet square on the board.

We also circle the same quiet truth, one we know all too well in our weary, decrepit bones. A truth that is stranger than time and kinder than witnessing:

A stalemate is not the death of motion, it is its recalibration.

It’s precisely within this recalibration that something else begins to emerge. A truth giving birth to another:

Movement does not cease simply because it cannot be witnessed.

And perhaps that is the real mercy buried inside every stalemate: that while the board appears frozen, while the sentence lies dormant, while The Creator Himself seems unwilling to intervene – something unseen continues.

Motion, I’ve learned, often begins long before it becomes legible. And when it finally reveals itself, it does so with the gentlest of gestures: a sentence leaning forward, just enough for me to follow.

So it goes.