The Tide Of Life — How Emotionally Unprepared We Are For Loss
During your childhood, you probably played hide and seek. But did you ever try the other, more terrifying version?
Reading time: 5 minutes
When a woman makes the choice to marry and have children, in one way, her life begins, but in another way, it stops. You build a life of details, you become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move.
And when they leave, they take your life of details with them.
— The Bridges Of Madison County, movie by Clint Eastwood, 1995
The way most people play hide and seek is the following: one person closes their eyes and counts to 30, while everyone else hides. Then, the person who counted goes on to find where the others are hidden. When someone gets found, they join the search crew, which grows bigger and bigger over time.
There is another less known way to play hide and seek — slightly different rules, totally different experience.
It’s called sardines.
The sardines version
When you play sardines, there is only one person hiding. Everyone else is counting to 30. And when one of the searchers finds the person hiding… the searcher hides with her! Over time, the people hiding have to squeeze themselves together in the hidden place — like canned sardines, hence the name — while the searchers become fewer and fewer. When a searcher spots the hiding place, she has to reach it without being seen by the other searchers. Therefore, if another player is nearby at the time, the goal is to mislead him to another location, then come back to hide. The last person searching loses the game.
One detail makes sardines infinitely more intense than the regular hide-and-seek version — the anxiety felt by the searchers.
At the beginning of a sardines game, perhaps because of the darkness, players tend to move in groups. They look around, they talk to each other, they laugh, everything is fine… Then the laughter becomes rare. The person who was next to you two minutes ago is no longer answering. Where is she? You try to find the rest of the group you were with, but they seems to have moved somewhere else. But where did they go? Actually, where did everybody go?! In the distance, you hear voices, you run to them. By the time you arrive, there’s nothing, the place is empty. Time flies, the night gets darker, people disappear...
Until you find yourself alone.
The experience of things disappearing
Playing sardines lets you live through the full experience of things disappearing around you. And it’s an opportunity for you to discover how emotionally unprepared you are for that.
In classical music, you may be familiar with the wonderful progression of the Bolero, composed by Maurice Ravel. It starts with notes that are barely perceptible, and gradually increases towards an incredibly loud orchestration masterclass. But can you think of an opposite example — a piece of music that would start off strong, and slowly fade away, one instrument at a time?
In your home, when you need something that isn't there, it’s a natural process to bring in something new. So why does it feel so difficult to deal with things you don’t need anymore?
If you are working for a tech organization, I’m sure you have a roadmap process to add features to your product. Do you have a similar process to remove features?
When you join a company, they usually have you go through his full onboarding program. When you leave, things can be more messy. Why is that?
All your family and friends are there for your wedding. How many for your divorce?
The symbolic milestones of a human life are mostly about new things being added. Yet, the end-to-end experience of life also contain a clear progressive diminution of things. Friendships fade away. The body loses it functions. The brain becomes less reliable. Dreams vanish. Curiosity disappears.
Funerals are perhaps the only ritual that celebrates the ending. But it only covers the end point, not the process.
Beyond playing sardines, how can we prepare ourselves for that?
Thank you to the Blondeau and Guyot families for the shared childhood memories. Thank you to Jean-Baptiste Vieille for unknowingly encouraging me to write such essays. Thank you to Fabien Crombé for having organized a memorable sardines session.