I just finished watching, ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ on Netflix, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. To summarize, it’s about an orphan who is a chess prodigy and how she battles the demons of her mother’s death and wins at chess – dealing with drugs, addiction, loneliness.

It is quite thrilling for a movie about chess. It took all of my will power to restrain myself my googling the ending or moving the cursor forward. What caught my attention was the statement by her adorable friend Jolene who says, ‘Girl, you have been the best at what you do for so long that you do not even know what it is like for the rest for us.’

And I also recall a video from Brene Brown where she says that in today’s world all of us want to be the best. And in a room full of people – if you apply the law of averages it is not possible. All of us cannot be the best, and this means only some of us will be the best and not that rest of us are not the best. This is where society’s fixation on the top three or five has skewed the entire world.

I want to speak to the person who first introduced the concept of first and attached so much importance to it that is outright silly or illogical. My litmus test these days is to ask myself, ‘What would an alien say?’ And if an alien did come to earth, sat through all the games – regional, quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals – and saw that people only spoke about the person who came first – what would his response be.

He would be flabbergasted – it’s like preparing for a hundred-mile walk and only talking about the last step across the winning line. He would probably laugh saying that we have missed the point of the race or the walk or the competition or even LIFE. We focus only on 1% of the life which society shines a light on – what about the 99% which is us. Sadly for most of us, we never get to discover what is essential for us. Most of us go through the life trying to live the life we believe we chose BUT believe it or not society – our unconsciousness had a big role to play in it.

Don’t believe me – then tell me one thing in your life that you would do even if you were penniless. If you can think of one – good, I commend you for maintaining sanity in the mad world. Let me ask you this – would you still do that one thing if no one was watching?

That is the litmus test – what matters most to you? The journey or the end or both. And to find out what ONLY YOU are best at – let life flow through you – be life and then the question – what am I going to do with my life DOES NOT MATTER.

Will you be one with life and let it flow through you?