Sunday, August 20, 2006

Weekend Gaming

None, sadly.

One of the ... inconveniences about shabbat is that you can't write. The reason why is somewhat complicated, having to do with business and the temple sanctuary.

But anyhow, the shabbat experience is an amazing one. It's hard to describe it to people who haven't experienced it. It's a day for not moving forwards at all, but only enjoying what we already have. One day a week, you can't write for your blog, pursue your career, work on your invention, or build onto your new house.

It's a day of rest from the idea that we always have to be accomplishing something to have intrinsic value. Let us make no mistake; the rest of the week, accomplishing things is a high priority. We are not lazy or against progress. But if we never take time to see what is around us, then we can never appreciate it. That's a good argument for games, and one of the reasons that I like to play them on shabbat.

However, simple innocuous things are set aside on this day in order to preserve that separation from the work week, and one of them is writing.

It's not that I wanted to write on my blog this shabbat. I just wanted to write down the several great ideas I had for blog posts, all of which I have now forgotten, as I expected that I would.

Oh, well. That's what we say when the electricity goes out on shabbat, or the phone rings, or the food ends up having been burnt. Oh, well. We can live with that. We didn't build our house well enough; or we weren't prepared for what happened. We didn't cook the food properly. We are imperfect. We are unprepared. We are at the mercy of much that is beyond our power and our ability.

And after shabbat, we clean up and start another week of work.

But the blog posts ... let's see if I can remember one of ...

...

I think I wanted to get into game rules, contrasting them with my recent post about the futility of perfecting law.

Let's see what I can come up with.

Yehuda

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