Saturday, 17 May 2025

Open Thoughts: Behind the Masks

Why have Open Thoughts chess sessions?

Because we all have a story to tell and a desire to feel safe and secure.

An opportunity to spend quality time with the people we care about and, hopefully, who care about us, too.

Feeling safe and confident enough to share one’s story when, in an increasingly noisy and unsatisfactory world, listening skills are an extreme rarity.

Perhaps the story goes like this…

Feeling undervalued - and, certainly, underpaid - at work.

Enduring tensions from colleagues and even from people from closer to home.

Feeling one is living a life unfulfilled; dreams sometimes drift close to being captured but repeatedly prove to be too nebulous and elusive to be turned into reality.

Frustration arising from not being as good as one wants to be, at chess and various other things too.

Feeling the years slip away with no improvements on any of the above; just becoming one year older each time.

Experiencing more losses and heartaches as one grows older. At which point does the life story settle into anything resembling a ‘happy ever after’ scenario? Why is it always such a struggle and a battle?

If we can break down the boundaries, perhaps we can share the struggles and ease life’s burdens, using the Open Thoughts sessions as a starting point.

Now, read the story again, from the start.

Be honest with yourself; is it my story, or…is it yours?

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