The Unbearable Lightness of Dying

"You died, Daddy! You died!" Video game night with my boys brings out their best and their worst, as they bounce around the room, shrieking with excitement. They are so excited to see the shapes move upon the screen, to have the images be acted on by human force, even if it's just their parents sitting on the couch. They can call out commands and instructions, "Jump over there! Watch out for the floating mask!" And the figures on the screen will respond and sometimes even succeed.

But often fail. "You died, Daddy! You died!" As Mario plummets off the bottom of the screen, the sad music plays, and then we start it all over again. The shrieking, the bouncing, the excitement.

I die a lot when I play video games. It’s often my “shelf point” for a game. If I find myself dying at the same point over and over, I’ll get frustrated and switch to a different game. Because of this, the number of games that I have actually played through to the end is actually quite small, especially compared to the number of games I’ve played through the past forty years.

I used to be afraid of dying in video games. Dying meant I had failed, and failing meant I wasn’t any good at video games, which was heart-breaking, because I loved video games, and wanted to be playing them. Dying meant that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to figure out the puzzle or to hit the buttons in the right order with the right timing. And I can take the not having enough coordination to hit the buttons correctly; I have trouble navigating door frames without bumping the sides.

I have a fear of failure. I don’t like not being good at something right away, and while I can recognize that it’s important to work at something to become good at it, that doesn’t mean that it has to agree with me. Failure in video games comes in the form of dying. If you die, you fail. Fortunately, in video games, you get to try again, but that still doesn’t erase the feeling of failure.

And that sense of failure, of worthlessness, spreads outward to everything else as well. Or maybe it comes from within, maybe it’s just tied to the deepest core, and colors everything. Pretty soon every little setback feels like failure, feels like you’re letting yourself down, and you should have known better. You shouldn’t even try if you’re going to fail, right? Just opening yourself up to confirming your negative feelings.

But this is all in my head, and I don’t have to listen to myself. I can change the story. I don’t have to be a failure. I’m not worthless. I’m not, after a long time of being the opposite, I’m not unhappy with myself, with who I am. I’m actually pretty happy, happy with me, with my life, my family, my house, my job, my hobbies, but most importantly, I’m happy with me.

And dying isn’t failing. Or really, failing isn’t dying. Failing isn’t the end, and it isn’t a judgement. It’s simply a state, a binary, either you succeeded or you didn’t.

And this extends outwards as well. If you can’t accept the possibility of failure, you will never succeed. If you can’t embrace the fact that you will die then how are you going to to get down to the business of living.

So Mario keeps jumping, keeps missing the jump and plummeting into the gap. But he gets back up, dusts himself off, tries again. Focusing on the fall is missing the point, or rather missing the fun of playing the game. In the end, the dying is unbearably light.