SUCH IS LIFE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4234, 22 January 1940, Page 7

SUCH IS LIFE

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. It is a game most of us have played, though probably it is now a long time since. That there is something primarily satisfying about it is suggested by the fact that children continue to find delight in it. Even grown-ups, in frivolous mood, are not disdainful of the old device. Wheneevr public ceremonial atmosphere becomes stuffy, or the learned lecturer is dreary, youth and maid can sometimes be noticed behind the backs and chairs of others silently and smilingly finding fun in playing noughts and crosses. Nothing could be more scimple; equipment is readily available; rules are few and easy to follow. Players are assigned sometimes noughts, sometimes crosses; then upon their foresight and mental alertness depends their fortune in the game. The process contains some reminiscences of human experience—denials and defeats, failures and frustrations, life’s noughts and crosses. In the normal individual’s earliest memories, even when these are of the happiest, noughts and crosses are usually freely interspersed. Parental, scholastic and even, in a remote way, police authorities seemed to be constantly playing with us a game of cross purposes. The adventures we secretly planned were found out and forbidden. The school prizes our fond parents confidently believed we would obtain were, for reasons which doubtless seemed good to the examiner, given to some other. The average man will usually be found ready to admit that in adolescence his emotions developed more rapidly than his brains. There was at least one faitmaiden who refused to reciprocate his affection, and he felt there was nothing left to live for. Although cruelly Crossed in love, however, he fortunately did not commit suicide, as he then contemplated. He had been grateful ever since that he was. at a somewhat later stage, privileged to give to the woman who now keeps him happy the heart lie at one time believed to be a broken one. Out on the world’s parade ground men and women are apt to find themselves the recipients of crosses other than those given for valour. Their merits are strangely unrecognised; their best efforts go unrewarded: their excelsior aspirations are thwarted. The first job they did not get, the examination they failed to pass—such incidents could be marked on their life’s chart as points at which their activities and ambitions went off at a tangent in some entirely different direction. But from the niche of success achieved in the vocation to which they were literally crossed over men frequently discern how certain would have been their failure had they been permitted to enter upon that other.

For a vast number of men and women, however, the seemingly unbroken succession of noughts can make life drably monotonous. The process expresses itself in constant repetitions of trivial duties, in the dullness of nothing ever happening. The walls of some lives, even seemingly well placed lives, can in reality be “so blank that their shadow they thank for sometimes falling there.” And yet the rules of the old game apply. It is not the noughts and crosses that matter most; it is the use made of them. It is impossible to ignore the fact that, practically from birth, some people seem specially exposed to the cruel lash of circumstance. Biography, however, abounds in instances of men and women who made inspiring use of their noughts and crosses. Some of the world’s finest work has been done by men who seemed beaten before ever they began. Milton was blind as he composed “Paradise Lost,” Beethoven was deaf as he composed his symphonies, Bunyan wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” in gaol, Walter Scott wrote much of his last work writhing in pain, R. L. Stevenson was a consumptive, Nelson had only one eye and one arm when he broke the power of Napoleon.

Such instances bear witness that by a brave and wise arrangement of life’s noughts and crosses it may be possible to render valiant service and to experience great happiness. Struggle is the essence of all sentient existence, but often the struggle has to be carried on against heavy odds. In contrast there are lives

which seem to be singularly free from noughts and crosses, physical and financial; they know nothing of the cross of ill-health or of the nought of wealth, even wealth very moderatelyconceived. Such seeming good fortune tends to incite envy, and yet it is apt to cause in those who experience it a lack of understanding and of sympathy. There are lives which it is impossible not to feel would have been all the better and happier if they had been tossed out into the world and compelled to carry some share of its noughts and crosses. History has invested with a well earned halo many brave souls who though ill-equipped for the fight refused to accept defeat. They trod though noughts and crosses underfoot, and used them as foundation stones for achievements of which they had

cause to be proud and for which pos. terity has cause to be grateful. In any survey of life’s noughts and crosses it is natural that- the standpoint should be ego-centric. There is, how- - ever, another angle of which we may - not be entirely neglectful. It Is not at all improbable that we have, from time to time, made adverse Impact on ; lives better than our own. Through- ; out not only our early but also our ; mature years our wilful tollies, our ; egregious blunders have been for certain others the blankest of noughts, the sorest of crosses. That probabil- J ity might well prompt us to suffer our own share more cheerfully, sustained by the hope that at the close of the game the All Wise Onlooker will be able to pass through our series of noughts, or of crosses, that straight line which will signalise for us a Wtt.