One of the squad leaders at Investigations told me I was playing a game with broken pieces.  Yup – and a whole lot more.  I used to say that one of the skills I’ve picked up since young is to play with not only said broken pieces, but also color changing ones on a shifting board.  

I was good at times, bad at others.  While not true all the time, I mostly did not enjoy it.  May have been designed for some of it, but I really just wanted to sit by the ocean, read books, and play with cats.

Many times, the board has looked poor.  The number of unmovable pieces has grown with time.  Sometimes, I hear the possible voice of God whisper, you’re looking at the board wrong.  Most of the time, I just stare at the board with questions, sometimes with resignation.

But all variables aside and the fact that the unmovable pieces aren’t as formidable as they appear, I can still move the most important piece – mine.  

There’s an excellent award winning documentary available for free on YouTube “AlphaGo” – it chronicles the series of matches played by an AI program against a Go grandmaster.

I won’t tell you who prevails, but there is a key game in there where the grandmaster makes an unexpected counterintuitive move.  And it’s brilliant, the winner, even possibly divinely inspired.  In fact, it’s now known in the Go community as the “God Move.”

I’ve done this several times.  It looks like spur of the moment but it’s based in Coach John Wooden’s philosophy of slow-slow fast-fast.  He planned his practices down to the minute – not only efficient, but effective.

And sometimes it’s not a “God Move” but rather a series of moves (still learning this one).