Mixed Bag of Emotions

Emotions are a mixed bag of tricks, aren't they Dear Reader? I recently played the game Trouble. In the game, each player attempts to secure their own safety by getting to the spot on the board that represents "home". In the playing, there can be strategy ranging from ruthless killing that results in opponents having to start again, to the most obnoxious benevolence, where killing is avoided at all costs. Guess which kind of player I am? I play to win Dear Reader, just in case you weren't sure. I am a dice popping opponent slaying chortling when I kill type of player. This, I admit comfortably, is my dark side enlivened in a harmless game of chance with morals and emotions somehow thrown into the mix. Hurt feelings would be ridiculous in playing this game and yet, there is a strange sense of low level anxiety when someone pops the dice and each player wonders, will my little primary coloured man on the board survive or be pushed back to the starting blocks? Amplify this game of Trouble and look at its intricacies, played out innocently enough on a plastic covered painted board. The creators of the game named it well because it is a microcosm of real life, simplified and designed to replicate some of the real life people navigations we experience daily. Each players view of the world and how they treat others can be analysed...Do you play to win at all costs? Does it matter to you if feelings are hurt as you try to make it home to safety? Are you cautious around others, worried about what they will think if you "kill" them in order to live yourself? Do you tiptoe around the board, politely ensuring that everyone stays safe, ignoring the end goal, forgetting the reason you started playing in the first place? What is ignored in your polite deference to others and their needs being met? If you are a ruthless player, what pain inflicted on other do you disregard to ensure your needs are met? What emotions do you mute, ignore, disregard in the troubled life you live, Dear One? What if there is room for expression for all of them? What would the game of life look like for you than? Uncomfortable politeness serves no one and is not a place to land or stay. Sometimes trouble is exactly what we need to stir us from our revelry, get our emotional juices flowing so that we can choose to make it "home" based on what we love and how we want to live with our selves and in community. Emotions are wonderful in all of their glorious expressions, even the ones that surface from discomfort. How willing are you to allow all expressions of who you are? When this becomes your new way, you open the doors to others and they too, get to be free to share what is in their hearts and on their minds. The End goal, Dear One, is for everyone to make their way home.