Recently I’ve been thinking about this Paul Bowles quote, which I first saw on Brandon Lee‘s gravestone, in relation to gaming:
“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
I don’t know about you, but my stack of “bucket list” gaming items — campaigns, megadungeons, settings, systems — is probably past the point of being feasible in my lifetime.
Some things on the list, like playing a MechWarrior campaign where we use BattleTech for the ‘Mech fights, I’ve been dragging around for years (roughly 25 years, for that one). Others are fresh, but I can feel them sinking comfortably into the warm, cozy blanket of wishful game-pondering.
If I turned myself to clearing the whole list, with a purpose and a fire in my eyes, and excluded all gaming that wasn’t bent to that purpose, maaaaybe I could get through it all . . . but I’d have fewer friends, and no lovely serendipitous gaming opportunities, and no con sessions, and so on. It’s in no way worth the cost.
So with 30-40 years of productive gaming time ahead of me — if I’m lucky, and stay fortunate, and don’t develop Alzheimers, and on and on — how do I chip away at the list? Do I chip away at the list? Do I even make a formal list?
I don’t know. I’m not maudlin about it, exactly, but it is a sobering thought. Only twenty more moonrises, and all that.
