Have you played The Game?  Actually, you’re playing it right now.  Everyone is.

The rules of The Game are simple; don’t think of The Game.  If you do think of The Game, you lose and you start again.  It’s an interesting mental experiment; can you actually ignore The Game without playing it?  The origins of The Game are not clear, but my favourite is that it is a variation on a game played by two guys sat in a train station.  They had just missed their ride, and had many hours to wait until the next one so they agreed not to think of the train they’d missed, their pain-in-the-ass journey, or their predicament.

It’s quite possible that you’ve played a variation of The Game at several times during your life.  I have – ignoring a letter from the bank, or a place/event I don’t want to go to, or trying to forget something I did the previous Saturday night.  My thought-process goes something like: If I don’t think of it, then it doesn’t exist and therefore I am in the clear.

By reading this though, you’ve just lost The Game – several times – and you do’t even have to clear away any pieces.