Jenga Joy

Want to slow your pace for a few minutes? Play Jenga with a child.

Are you familiar with this game? I wasn’t until recently, when Noah received it as a birthday gift, but I have to say, now I’m hooked. Here’s the basic premise: you arrange 40 or so rectangular blocks crisscross into a tower, and then each player takes a turn gently removing a single block without sending the entire structure tumbling.

At first even Rowan, Rowan the Red-Haired Wild Man, was more skilled at Jenga than I was. He was able to steady his erratic movements and delicately slide a block from the tower. My herky-jerky tendencies, on the other hand, more often sent the blocks crashing (which, I must admit, thrilled Rowan to the hilt). I’m getting better though. I am training my body, my limbs, to slow down. To move gently and mindfully.

I find playing Jenga almost hypnotic. It’s also the type of game that forces me to be fully present in the moment. Unlike Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders, or some of the other mind-numbing kids’ games, Jenga requires focus, concentration. It requires presence, which as you all know by now, is an element lacking in my harried life.

Strangely, I was reminded of Jenga as I listened recently to an interview with Eckhart Tolle on the NPR series Speaking of Faith. Prior to this, I hadn’t known much about Tolle, besides the fact that he looks strangely elfine and seems far too new-agey…and is an Oprah love-child – none of which scored him major points with me. I was surprised, though, by how much I liked Tolle when I heard the interview. He spoke honestly and genuinely about his own struggle with depression, and about the spiritual awakening that prompted him to begin to celebrate “the now,” the present moment, a moment unlike any in the past or the future. Tolle, it seems, is able to apply the Jenga moment to nearly every aspect of his everyday life.

The writer Anne Lamott says this about “the now” in this month’s O magazine (okay, okay, so I do totally love Oprah): “…as Einstein taught us, everything in the future and the past is here right now. There’s always something ending and something beginning.”

I concentrate too much of my time and energy on the “something ending” and the “something beginning” – the past and the future – rather than on the “here right now.” Playing Jenga with Rowan on a sleepy Thursday morning was a “here right now” moment. And I am grateful for that.