Correct play???
Submitted by
oginschile on Mon, 02/11/2008 at 1:16pm.
Now and then life calls for us to do something that feels a little unnatural. You know it's the right thing to do (or perhaps you are simply going with the status quo) but it just creates such a controversy inside you. In the end, you hope for something good to happen, though sometimes you can't see it. Perhaps the payoff is far away, and you simply have to trust that it's the right thing to do...
Today My wife and I put our three year old on the bus for the first time on his way to pre-school. It's an odd feeling handing your child over to someone, so they can strap him in and drive off. We watched him through the windows as he was walked toward the back of the bus, his eyes on us the whole time. Doubts crept up as we saw the quizzical look on his face, obviously wondering why we were sending him away. And when his first tear fell, I had to fight the urge to rip the bus apart and carry him away.
But we tried to stay strong. We smiled and waved encouragingly, belying the pinball game my heart was playing inside of me. Somehow my little warrior mustered the courage to sit down and let himself be buckled, but he never broke eye contact with us.
If I didn't send my boy to pre-school there would be people who would ask "What kind of parents are you?" Why then must we do something that makes me ask inside myself, "What kind of parents are we?"
We second and third guess ourselves, we second and third guess the system. And after all is said and done, we hope for something beautiful.
Chess is rife with such experiences, we only need to have the courage. Nigel Short's king march is one such example. When you see the finished product, it all makes sense. But when you see the king marching up the board for the first time, it looks like suicide. The pay-off is a game that lives in chess lore for all time. But the courage it took to walk that razor's edge is remarkable.
The following is a game where just such a position happened. Black has a nice position, but it is difficult to see where he can make progress. His rook appears destined to stay on the backrank, in part for defense of the king, but more so because it just doesn't seem there is any way to activate him.
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A beautiful finish thanks to some courageous and unorthodox play. In chess, the ends justify the means. The king walk may have appeared ugly to some, but in the end it was the correct thing to do.