Elemental, Dear Watson

The screenshot originates from the 2011 film, Chalet Girl, where Chloe breaks her leg.  It connected with a conversation I'd had the day before with my daughter about playing "slaps" as kids, and how that morphed into more and more dangerous games.  Which in turn connected to the ideas I'd put forward with this post two weeks ago.

Slaps progresses into bloody knuckles and then mercy ... which leads to Jackass-type activities, particularly for the male trying to "prove" they can go further than other people.  But even if we take the "pissing content" motif out of the dangerous game, there's a tendency for some people to experiment with savage activities that aren't about "besting" your opponents so much as they're about our sheer fascination with risk and personal reward.  Thus, skiing.  Yes, there are people who want every run to be a competition, but there are more people who take enormous risks to challenge themselves.  In the film above, Chloe overreaches due to feelings of jealousy ... but I needed a shit-look-what-happens-when-people-ski picture and this one worked.

I made the argument with this post that my readers are probably those who engage themselves in dangerous activities ... like skiing, for example.  And at this point it's worth noting the intrinsic societal support for these activities.  The ambulance.  The professional health care workers whose job it is to be at the ready on ski slopes and dozens of other like places — with the acknowledgment that people are going to seriously hurt themselves, even kill themselves, in pursuit of something they like, but which produces no critical value to society.

Or does it?  Stick a pin in that.

I suspect I may have told this story on this blog before, so stop me if you've heard this.  I have a scar on the underside of my chin that I collected, I think at the age of 18.  Who remembers?  It matches the scar on the brow of a fellow named Steve that I collided with.  We were playing a game at midnight around an unlit outdoor jungle gym behind a school in the Calgary neighbourhood of Dalhousie.  The game was tennis ball tag; obviously, the feature was a dangerous-at-night landscape full of shadows and other bodies running at top speed.  And before you say, "Oh, sure, we did that too," ask yourselves, would you let your children play a game like that?  Would you, to take that a step further, sit in a chair silently outside the circle of play and watch your children play?  I think you would not.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of kids on any serious ski-slope you visit — and I'll take a moment to point out that the ski slopes out west of me are world-class.  Calgary hosted a Winter Olympics.  This does not cut down the number of kids ... and kids as young as eight skiing on black diamond slopes.  If a kid's going to be competitive as a skiier, he or she had better be up to a black diamond slope before they're eight.  Believe me, there are lots of parents ready to see their kids be very competitive.

So why do we do it?  Why do we habitually participate in an activity that could get us killed?  Why do we push our children into it?  Why did we make up games in our late youth that were deliberately provoking accidents ... that left permanent marks on us that we'd carry the rest of our lives? 

Most of the time, we make up completely bullshit explanations that can't be examined, because there's nothing there to deconstruct.  For example, we like the rush.  Or, we don't think anything'll happen to us.  These are easy answers and they sound plausible.  They also ignore that there are safer and easier ways to get a "rush;" and people are not so stupid that they cannot see ambulances and bodies being loaded into them.  Maybe they say to themselves, "That guy wasn't paying attention," but then they have a very near miss themselves, or an accident, and sober up fast.  Most skiiers have done something to themselves.  They know they can be hurt.

It's more than a rush.  I can do cocaine and get a rush — and of course, for a lot of people, that's enough.  But danger from skiing, surfing, kayaking, night tag, what have you, has an element that cocaine and say, pursuing intercourse in public, don't have.  It's possible to get better at it.  I can do a lot of cocaine, I'm never going to improve my cocaine taking skills; basically, you reach a point of competency and there you are.  You can snort differently, but not "better."  And sorry for those who haven't learned yet, having sex in a park or an elevator are elements where we get better at the planning, but the activity itself hits that same competency level.

But many things we do don't have that ceiling.  No matter how good we get, there's always something we haven't learned yet how to do ... and that element is central to the activity.  We want to reach the next stage and there is always a next stage.  That's because we're dealing with a thing that's elemental, that's intrinsic within the powers of nature.  And this has a degree of occult and alchemy attached.  This produces feelings we cannot otherwise feel.

When you completed your first black diamond run, you paused and looked back and the mountain you just came down.  And you couldn't believe you had done it.  Couldn't.  The visual of the mountain and the fact of what you'd done couldn't be reconciled consciously.  For most of us, it's a feeling we've only had a few times.  Many have never had it.  Some reading this now are remembering that moment and can still feel it and still can't connect the dots.

We can apply this same construction to slaps.  You hold your hands out and I slap them; and it hurts.  We reverse and you slap me.  And we get faster, both at pulling away and at slapping — and if we're evenly matched we can play for a long time, until our hands are beet red from being struck again and again.  Endorphins are pulsing through our systems, managing the pain ... until we look at our hands and see the evidence of the pain we must have suffered; but now, that pain doesn't seem very important.  We learn that, in fact, we can handle quite a lot of pain and not be crippled by it.  Subconsciously — because we're just kids — we come to understand that pain is not a boundary ... not in the way it seems to be at the start of our lives.  We don't understand why pain isn't a boundary, but it's not.  Pain can be managed.  It can be tolerated.  It can even be quested for.

When our forebears were catching their breath after six of them finished off an enormous mastodon, they felt the same disjointed, can't-believe-we-did-that discontinuity.   Since they comprehended fear and awe, apparently, in the way they lived and what they depicted, we can be sure they also felt this.

Let's take the pin out of the thing above.  The value of this elemental feeling is that it teaches us to believe we can do things that are "impossible" ... because, in fact, they're not.  They just seem impossible.  And for those of us who have done six impossible things before breakfast, this realisation of our potential is something we've acquired from hindsight.  It's not some bullshit where the Disney character says, "believe in yourself and you can do anything," it's the real thing where the mentor says, "If you think about what you've been able to do in the past, you'll realise that this is just the next thing."

We're not relying on belief or faith.  We know.  And this makes all the difference.

Revisiting that point above, about "They think it won't happen to them."  No, it's more that it HAS happened to them, five, ten or fifteen years ago, and they survived it.  Every person I've ever known who pursued this sort of activity, from rock climbing to soccer to cycling, can rattle off the five or six times they've been seriously injured.  They get up again and return to their passion because despite knowing that they can get hurt or killed, they also feel sure they know how to recover when — not "if" — something happens.  The rubbernecker outsider saying, "They think ..." are always talking about someone else.  They weren't there for those injuries, and most likely have never been injured doing something they love.  Meaning they're talking about themselves, saying, "If I were injured, I don't know what I'd do."  The accusation is a sign of weakness.  A lack of understanding what's happened and what is happening.

All right.  Now that we've well and truly gotten around the barn, where are we with D&D?

The understanding that we can do things that "can't be done" applies not only to dangerous, extremely difficult things.  Once this principle is baked into one's consciousness, it applies to everything.  It applies to our work, to getting married, to raising children, to putting a back deck on the house ourselves.  It applies to everything we learn, everything we attempt and everything we fail at.  It's a core of the expression that says, "... in which individual players strive against limitations to accomplish  — and potentially fail at  — uncertain goals as a means of self-challenge."   If you shied from slaps as a kid; if you never learned to swim, even though you had teachers who tried; if you never had the nerve to enter college or failed to complete it; if you've deliberately spent your life pursuing past-times that had no serious physical consequences ... then yeah, you haven't the training to play my kind of D&D.  I can give you the training.  But chances are, you won't last long enough to stay with it.

Couple days ago, JB made this point:

" And yet, 'paying dues' is a necessary part of the system...it is, in fact, imperative to the growth and development of the players. Players need to learn the system: what works, what doesn't, how to interact with it and survive and thrive. When you (the DM) allows that to occur...that natural growth, including all the 'growing pains' (failure, death, etc.)...it allows everyone, players AND referee, to elevate their game."

My players come into the game wanting it elevated past the point where I've lifted it so far.  They're not content with what I've done.  They want more.  They come from life tracks where wanting more is de rigueur.  And I want them to want more.  I want more.  JB's right in coaching other DM's to let their players fail, to encourage them to grow.  But that alone is not going to do it ... as evidenced by the DMs who express to me all the time that they follow JB's advice and their players just can't figure out how to get on board.  I fully support JB's argument.  But it starts with the DM changing his or her self first.

JB is a fellow who's been transformed by experiences of having a family, living years of his life in a distinctly foreign country, the simple fact of having to overcome serious impediments to get himself into his 40-somethings.  His kids are learning his lessons because he's willing to kill their characters ... and the kids are learning that "dying" isn't the end.  That the game's potential isn't that you live and get rich and super-powerful, but that fucking-amazing events happen if you get the hell out of the way and LET THEM HAPPEN.

And what does everybody say?  "I don't believe it."  The same sentiment as standing at the bottom of the black diamond run.  The sense that we have touched something unnatural, if just for a moment.

When we do that, it changes us as children.  As we grow to be adults, we learn how to make these things happen.  We trust we can.  Which in turn leaves a mark on what sort of people we are.  And what kind of games we want to play.