Gordan's Knot
/The mind works best when steered in the right direction.
————
Gordan fiddled with his tie until he’d managed a hopelessly entangled knot. Gordan’s mom sighed! With a single snip of her scissors she freed the tie from Gordan’s neck. Oh, don’t worry dear. Just wear the clip-on. Ties are silly, anyway.
When the party was over, Gordan was surprised. Not one kid had mocked the clip-on tie. Mom smiled, she knew what Gordan would know later. People are too worried about their own worries to notice what worries you.
The incident was quickly forgotten - except by Emily. Emily was impressed by Mom’s one-snip solution to Gordan’s knotty problem. The snip was one thing, the dismissal of Gordan’s worry about the tie, was another. Emily told the story of Gordan’s knot to her friends when they worried on and on about complicated problems. “You know, Jenny, my brother, Gordan, got all tangled up trying to tie his tie until Mom cut the knots and told him to just wear the clip-on”.
Jenny was confused by Emily’s story of Gordan’s knot. “What in the world does that have to do with me and the horrible mess I’m in”?
Emily got that that a lot. She finally stopped telling the story.
Some of Emily’s friends got the point. Most didn’t. Most of Emily’s friends didn’t appreciate the story of Gordan’s knot. They preferred the drama of complicated struggle to the lack of drama in just wearing the clip-on.
Emily sadly realized what was going on. A lot of people don’t really want solutions; they need the churn of unfolding crisis to give colorful purpose to their life. A simple solution would ruin the game. Then what? Then they would be forced to live in reality. That’s no fun!
Maybe that’s the attraction of all games. Games are distractions from reality. Best of all, games have rules. Life is unpredictable. That’s no fun at all. Games allow the thrill of battle without any threat of injury, except disappointment for losers. Even losing can be overcome by resetting the board for another game.
There are real-life problems that truly are complicated. Most problems don’t get that way without work and imagination. Gordan wouldn’t have got so tangled up in his tie if he had understood that none of the kids cared whether it was a properly tied tie or a clip-on.
Most complications are self-inflected.
Cutting to the heart of the problem is easier when you realize the problem is other than it seems.
Emily had a moment very like déjà vu in her ninth-grade history class when she first heard the story of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot.
By K. L. Shipley
Website: https://www.eclecticessays.com