I’m not personally really big on video games, but my kids are all passionate players of video games of all kinds. One of the things I like about video games is that the game is never truly over.  If you’re killed, you’ve often got another life in your queue.  Even if you’ve used up all your lives, you get that sad “Womp womp womp” music, and the words “Game Over” flash on the screen, it’s still just a matter of re-starting the game,  Sure, you might have to start over from the beginning, but you’re never really done.

In Star Stable, one of the games I play with the seven year old, your horse never dies.  It gets sad if you don’t feed it and brush it often enough…. but it always forgives you once you start taking better care of it.  And you can fall off of cliffs (something I do a lot, because apparently I’m as clumsy in pixelated-horse-rider form as I am in real life, walking-down-the-street form), but it just results in a whinny and a little pop-up message that says you’ve “taken a dangerous fall, but your horse has miraculously survived.”   Then it spawns you and your horse back to the top of the cliff, no worse for the wear.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because for the past month or so, my real life has been way off-line. I’ve been fighting off some sort of virus for what feels like forever, one that’s so persistent I’m still coughing a good four weeks after it all started.   I’ve gotten completely out of my normal routine.  I haven’t been sleeping. Housework has piled up, projects have piled up, emails have piled up.   This past weekend, I was so distracted that I did something I never do and flaked out on something I promised I’d help someone with.  Just straight-up forgot about it. And even though I apologized, I’m still heavy with the guilt of having let someone I care about down.  I feel stressed out and frustrated, but beyond that I feel a disproportionate sense of…. failure. Perfectionism kicks in, and I feel like I’ve been failing on all fronts.  And when that happens, I have a tendency to get depressed and defeatist, which of course only exacerbates the problem.  I literally start to feel like I’ll never get back in my groove, even though I know intellectually that that’s not the case.

So, I’ve decided I need to start giving myself more grace, and treating life like a video game. Yeah, there will be times I’ll get off track, get lost, use up all my energy pellets, fall off the cliff. But it doesn’t mean it’s time to quit the game.  It’s just time to re-group, that’s all.  And to give it a positive spin, it’s the best opportunity to re-establish goals, adjust priorities, and assess what sort of prize you’re actually pursuing,  It’s a chance to return your focus to where it needs to be, and not let it be complicated by the pesky little distractions of the game.

I’ve been reading a lot about meditation lately, and one thing that I find really interesting is that most people mistakenly think that the real work of meditation is emptying your mind of all thoughts, when really the opposite is true.  Your meditation muscle is flexed when all the random, fleeting, unhelpful thoughts do come…. and you gently and persistently (and over and over and over again) return your thoughts to peace and quiet, or to God, or to your mantra.  It’s something that gets easier over time, but it needs to be practiced, to be sure.

That’s where I am right now.  I’ve fallen off the cliff and I’ve gotten distracted by the proverbial fly buzzing in the yoga practitioner’s ear.  IT’S OKAY.  It’s just time to re-focus.  To get ready to re-start.  To gently accept the negative thoughts, but then let them go.  To breathe deeply, to shake off the insecurities, and trust….. trust that it’s okay to be human,  trust that there’s nothing wrong with having to start over, trust that starting over just means another chance to get it right.

Trust that if you just hang tight, your horse will re-spawn to the top of the cliff, and you’ll be off and riding again.