tabletop silence
the die rolls without a hand—
lesson in the fall
There is a game I’ve played for years, though no one taught it to me. It has no rules printed on the box, no clean counters or colorful boards. You don’t buy it. It begins the first time something important to you shatters.
When I was ten, my uncle gave me a wooden chess set. The board folded in half like a suitcase, and the pieces rattled around inside like the memory of something that had never been finished. We played a game that summer. He beat me in twelve moves. Didn’t explain a thing. Just nodded, cleared the board, and asked if I wanted to go again.
I lost the next game too.
It became a ritual—our own silent season. I lost. Then I lost again. Then I made a mistake, learned from it, and lost differently.
He called it “building the muscle between losses.”
I didn’t understand what he meant until much later.
One rainy afternoon in Tokyo, I found myself in a tiny bar with a man named Koji who looked like he’d been waiting there since the 1980s. He wore a corduroy jacket and smelled faintly of tobacco and wet leaves.
“What game do you play?” he asked, out of nowhere.
“Lately? Mostly chess. Some Go.”
He laughed. “No, no. Not board games. The other kind. The one you forget you’re playing.”
I must’ve looked confused, because he poured me a plum wine without waiting for my reply.
“The kind with no winner,” he said. “Where the point isn’t points.”
“You mean like… life?” I asked.
He raised his glass. “Or death. Or failure. Or seasons.”
We drank in silence after that. The kind of silence that feels like someone else is thinking for you.
In this other game—the one without winners—pain is not a punishment. It’s a signal. Like the buzz of a wrong answer in a childhood quiz show. Except here, the reward is not correction but reflection.
You stumble. It hurts. You pause, if you’re lucky. Ask yourself what part of you expected something easier.
A friend once told me that his divorce was the best thing that ever happened to him. At the time, he said it with bitterness, like someone trying to convince a cracked mirror it still showed a whole face.
Years later, he admitted he was finally learning how to sit with himself. Not run. Not drink. Just sit. Make eggs slowly. Fold clothes with attention. That kind of healing doesn’t wear a medal, but you know it by the way someone drinks their coffee.
That’s what this game teaches. Not to win. But to notice where it hurt, and why.
I used to think time was linear. You move forward, achieve things, accumulate. Spring into summer, summer into success. But the older I get, the more I think in loops.
There are days that feel like winter, even in July.
Times you’re planting seeds, even though everyone else is harvesting.
I met a woman on a train from Ljubljana who told me she had just quit her job to take care of her dying mother. “It feels like I’m disappearing,” she said.
Later, I sent her a book by post with a note: Seeds do their best work underground.
She never wrote back. But I still wonder what season she’s in now.
This game—it’s patient. It will wait while you chase careers or relationships or prestige. And then, one day, you’ll find yourself lying awake at 3:14 a.m., unable to stop thinking about a conversation from seven years ago.
That’s a round.
The pain will come up, uninvited. But if you press into it—not away from it—it opens a door. A small one. The kind you crawl through. On the other side, you’re a little lighter. Not because you left anything behind, but because you picked up something true.
A boy I once knew failed every math exam for a year straight. His father punished him with silence. Not anger—just absence.
I asked him what hurt most. “That I never got to say what I didn’t understand,” he said.
Years later, he became a teacher. He tells his students, If it hurts, we pause there. That’s the doorway.
The thing about pain is it can’t lie. Joy sometimes does. It can be borrowed or worn like a mask. But pain always points to something real.
And if you learn to love the signal, you begin to evolve.
In the deepest part of winter—when the nights are long and even the air seems brittle—I play Go online with strangers in South Korea.
Most games I lose. But I’ve learned to love the shape of a mistake. It teaches more than victory ever could.
I’ve come to believe that time is not an arrow but a spiral. You pass the same place again and again, but with a different view. Like standing in a stairwell, looking down.
Maybe that’s what seasons really are.
Not weather. Not years. But returnings.
Spring when something new arrives. Summer when you’re full and flush. Autumn when things fall away but leave color. Winter when you bury your hands and listen.
If there is one rule in this game, it is this: struggle well.
Don’t waste your pain. Don’t hoard your joy. Let both move through you like weather.
Ask better questions. Write new principles. Be wrong in more interesting ways.
And when you sit down with someone, maybe over tea or bread or an old deck of cards—ask them what their last move taught them. Not if they won. Just what it changed.
They’ll pause. Then they’ll tell you a story.
And the game will go on.
life 
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