Character Sheet for Life and Death

experience, journaling, ttrpg, archetype, games

• What if it’s all fun and games?

• What if you are not yourself, you are playing your self?

• What if when you die, you make up a new character, and play the game again, only this time, with more experience?

• What would that change?

  

  Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Insight

Life is short, so they say. I think they mean that “you should be grateful for what you have, because sooner than you think, it will all be gone.” We don’t think often of death because, well, it’s a bummer.

Having worked 16 years in nursing, most of those years in hospice and elderly care, I have witnessed many people die, pass on, pass away, be no longer with us, go to heaven, become an angel…all of the sayings.

Indeed, life is short, but not when you consider all life summed up together. We know of at least 6000 years of history where we have been storing up experience for humanity’s ride on this world. 6000 years is a long time, but maybe not for a 20,000 year old being. The life span of my little hamster is 2 years, and that seems like robbery compared to my life, but for her - well, it’s expected.

And the expectations are really what determine whether or not life is short. Short for who?

He lived a good, long life, they say. What we mean is that he died when WE expected him too and therefore, have less to wonder, fear or become disillusioned about. Of course, we still grieve, still sad, but for the most part, our expectations of life are met and we sleep easy.

All this is to say, our expectations of reality count for our general happiness than reality itself. Because reality might say, we should live to be 20,000 years old and therefore a measly 95 would feel like a rip-off. Therefore, reality changes when our expectations of reality change.

I expect more - says the child staring into the universe. We call him ungrateful, proud, arrogant,…”who do you think you are to expect so much for your self.”

Well, what he’s really saying is that I want to change my world. I am a magician and spend my life creating a new expectation of reality, and therefore change reality itself, because what is reality except that which we expect it to be.

“That’s not real!” - we shout when we see something we don’t expect.

So, what if life is actually a game you are playing. What further expectations would you have - to have fun? To laugh? To do it again and again. Something children know well is that when something is fun, you just do it eternally - and lose track of time while doing it.

If it is not a game, then what is it - work, a project, a business contract? Or what if it is simply a character sheet, like the one I drew below?