On Friday we had a traditional party evening (with senseless music, alcohol, short conversations and lots of smiling faces). Then, all of a sudden, someone put a reasonable remark: “Let’s play Dixit cards!”
I ‘ve never been a big fan of this kind of entertainment, but this is an absolutely different case. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Dixit cards. Personally, I saw them here in Italy for the first time. At first, it seems nothing more than a simple game, but if you seek deeper, you’ll probably discover that it’s more than just a game, or life itself is nothing more than house of cards, in which every single card with its special illustration demonstrates a specific story, emotion, feeling, mood or practically anything else.
The main principle of the game is that you have to find an exact definition of the card that you’re holding in your hand, in order to express its hidden meaning, but you should try not to be very obvious because if everyone guesses your intention, you’ll get minus points. So you have to keep some “secret” for yourself, which is sometimes not so easy. When there’s another person’s turn, you have to guess their cards as well. If you get the plus points, your rabbit (which symbolizes you) will be more close to the finish line.
I think that the main aim of this play is to increase the skills of self-awareness and imagination in human beings, especially in children, but it also gives you a unique chance to observe the perception of other people. For example, what does the word “isolation” or “happiness” mean for somebody? The answers are always curious. With this play you can get to know someone’s personality better than with those short conversations on the balcony. The most important factor is that you cannot lie in this game, you cannot choose the other way than sincerity, otherwise you’ll probably lose your game.
So, as I was playing, I had this shabby association with life. We all have our unique stories, feelings, attitudes, even the most boring and ordinary people, we all have these… Sometimes we want it so god damn hard to find this definition and express ourselves, to cover our emptiness. But as in this game, we have to be careful not to be so obvious, otherwise, we’ll get an enormous minus point – pain.
Sometimes our words tell exactly what is in our heart, at this point, we are obsessed with the short-term feeling of happiness and our rabbit is slowly going to the finish line. On this road, we’re meeting lots of different people, sometimes we learn something from them, feel the rhyme of the universe better. Sometimes we’re crawling in the dark, maybe we also fall into the hole by accident. So we are sitting on the deep bottom of the hole, without any hope and light in front of us. But finally, we always manage to go up, through this obstacle, gathering the last pieces of our strength and continuing the way to the destination, because we were grown up with the knowledge that defeat is a tragedy and the losers are bad types. At last, someone is always first, the other one is always behind the stage.
But what happens when the game is over? Nothing at all. As one famous Georgian song says: “The king and the pike are thrown in the same box.” The most important is the process, the way itself.
“The feeling of the passion is creation not in observation of what you’ve created.” (Guram Rcheulishvili)
So, I have no idea, how my white rabbit will survive its road, but one thing I know for sure when I get back to Georgia, I’ll definitely take one Dixit card with me.
Sopio
InterCultuRurality 