When our kids were toddlers, and doing all that toddlers do so well, Paulette and I often joked that human beings start out with IQs of over 1000 but lose a point every time they fall down and hit their heads ... until they end up in the "normal" range. I recently was reminded of this when the instructional chess book How to Become a Class A Player came to mind. As (Class A player) Alan Beadle told me at a tournament in 1991, "The best way is to start out as a Master and go down!"

Similarly, perhaps:

• the best way to get rich is to inherit immense wealth, and then fritter away the majority of it;
• the best way to become enlightened is to be born with whatever is beyond enlightenment, and regress toward humanity from there;

etc., etc. But a self-help book that takes that honest an approach probably wouldn't sell many copies.

More seriously, maybe the best way to appreciate what we have is to lose most of it — as, eventually, we all do in this mortal world ...

(see also Chess1990To1991 (14 Dec 2000), ...)

TopicHumor - TopicLife - 2003-01-12

(correlates: PoemCrazy, ForgivenTrespasses, BuildingToLast, ...)