Over the winter holidays I was lucky enough to get to spend a week with my whole family in Colorado. This year, as all of us gathered together, a good number of us were preoccupied because of various transitions we are going through. Despite that preoccupation, though, we all launched into our favorite activities with one another—cooking, eating, hiking, and playing games. We were really trying to have fun and enjoy our time with one another but there were definitely moments of disconnect because of our distracted states.
All of that changed, though, in about five minutes one evening after dinner. A group of us had sat down to play one of our favorite games, a tile-based game called Qwirkle. As a family full of competitive people there were often exclamations of, “how could you do that?!” or “you just ruined my move!” All of which is meant in good fun, but can definitely have some edge to it. My brother, one of the most competitive of the bunch, was watching the round rather than playing and took it upon himself to take on the persona of a very mellow, non-competitive person to remind us that the game didn’t really mean anything, that it was “just tiles on a board” and then he went on to reference #jtob as the way we should all look at life….