Coronavirus diary: Chess, my brain and my son

Since the pandemic began, my son and I have played a regular -- not quite daily -- game of chess.

I am the furthest thing from a grandmaster. My skills really haven't advanced much since I was in sixth grade and learned the game anew, playing against friends in study hall. T, honestly, has more experience than I do in recent years -- but he's a kid, so he has a bit less patience for how the game develops.

One thing that frustrates me about myself, though, is that I'm not great at doing the thing you need to do in chess, which is plan several moves ahead, to see the game unfold before it unfolds. I win a lot against T, but it's not like I'm great at planning victory. Often, it just seems to happen. But the result is that chess is an area where I'm unable to hide behind the Dunning-Kruger effect -- I can see, with some precision, what my limitations are. And they make me wonder about the makeup of how I think in other endeavors, if I'm similarly limited. Indeed, I've also had a chance to read a lot more during the pandemic, and I while I'm a competent enough writer -- I mean, I get paid to do it, right? -- I can see how my writing and the thinking that underlies it probably misses a dimension accomplished by people I admire and respect. I'm not sure how, or if, I can acquire that dimension. Those limitations bump up against my ambitions and pretentions, and that's very goddamn frustrating.

The solace I take, though, is that the more often T and I play chess, the more I can start to see a move or two ahead. It takes practice. That gives me hope the same is true for my writing and thinking, but who the hell knows?

One thing I do, though, is I try to make the game more than about wins or losses. In the last couple of months, my son has gone from being overtly frustrated when he loses to calm and willingness to learn from a loss. That's a big gain. And when I win, I try to explain to him what it is I did to win -- my strategy, such as it is, so that he can think about ways to create his own counterstrategy. I'm trying to help him learn to think about these things. And I'm trying to get better at my own thinking.