knight

It occurs to me that the moves in chess have interesting parallels to human thought and even to our lives…

A rook represents an orthogonal approach – powerful and direct – but inflexible. A bishop has – literally – an oblique approach, with an ability to slice forensically past seemingly solid opposition. A pawn’s slow, forward plodding – with its frail hope of, in the end, overcoming almost insurmountable odds and reaching that butterfly like transformation at the end of the board – seems to me sadly indicative of so much of the human condition. The king, pityfully hemmed in, vulnerable, lives in a world where everyone IS out to get him. The queen, celebrity, high achiever, struggles to fulfil unreasonable expectations. And, finally, our knight, that paragon of left-field thinking, challenging others when he cannot be challenged himself; leaping over difficulties as if they were not there; arriving at his target by an idiosyncratic route. He’s the one I want to emulate…