126. The art of Weiqi (Go/Baduk) war (碁#12) 坎 (☰/☶)

My podcast number 125 is called "Ghosts of Shanghai" and that is the title of one of the books I'm currently reading. For most of my listener's, that podcast is like a pleasant diversion, most enjoyed the way some people get all their sleeping done on long-distance flights. It's fun to listen to, but it has no bearing to their lives. In fact, it's more like the helmsman has left the wheel and his second-in-command is praying that the ship doesn't run aground in some godforsaken place run amok with headhunters. In the game of Weiqi (Go/Baduk) there are places like that. Situations in which a player is forced to bring out their best. While we can see all the stones on the board - and - the places where there are no stones, as physical points of fact like the way castles dominate the land around them, the situation moving forward has for at least one of the players become a fog on the bog! Whatever nightmares they carry around with them, they are finally having to face them in a sweat that kind of looks like a fever. And I know, at that moment, up until that point, Weiqi had just been a fancy nerdy game. Nothing more, nothing less. Despite all the talk, they either never knew or realised the powerful implications of Weiqi being an "Art of War" manual. So here is where the men separate from the boys, and the ladies from the girls. Will you keep playing the game, even if you knew that every stone placed upon the board is powerfully changing your present-future reality around you? Will you dare to experience a life in where the people around you are Weiqi stones waiting to be or are being played? On that last question, it is not about manipulation. For nobody can actually be manipulated. People buy into the game to bring excitement to their lives. A life otherwise devoid of true meaning because most of the impulse to succeed has been fizzled out by modern living. That is why you see people living "off the grid", going native, and doing alternative lifestyles et cetera. To be so-called normal is to go plain vanilla everyday. starring at an empty Weiqi board that never gets touched. The board just sits there in silence waiting, waiting, waiting. Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip... Drip... ⚔️圍棋戰聖