The Long Story of Clarity Candle

The Story of Clarity has a lot to do with chess.

For years, I had been looking for a game that was mentally, intellectually, strategically and tactically challenging. A game so substantial that I would never really get bored of it, or run out of things to learn and explore.

I hadn't found it until lockdown happened. I watched The Queen's Gambit, like everyone else seemed to be doing at the time, and realised I had become fascinated by this game. With such a finite number of chess pieces (32) and squares (64), they create more possible chess moves than there are atoms in the observable universe. Mind blowing.

That passion quickly faded, though, and stayed faded for a few years. Between starting my very first job and career, and living my life surviving but not thriving in London, it wasn't a period where I even thought about chess, or much else beyond getting through the week.

It was a turbulent few years. I was deeply disoriented and my nervous system was wrecked. I didn't make time for myself, or take care of myself. The zest of life felt like a dream, a luxury I couldn't afford. I went from being ‘Yaya who always found time to do things’, to ‘Yaya who didn't want to do anything at all’.

It's so easy to come home and go to the pub. It's so easy to go on autopilot, and before you know it, you're someone who is constantly anxious and stressed.

It wasn't until I fully had a mental breakdown, after hitting rock bottom, that anything changed. The stress from work had finally caught up with me. As someone who doesn't set healthy boundaries, coupled with the slippery slope of taking on, and being given, too much work, I had suffered for months with severe mental fatigue, stress and anxiety, without really admitting it to myself.

I broke down crying one Sunday, after what might have been the worst case of the Sunday scaries I'd ever had. I called the doctor the next day and was signed off work for a whole month.

It was during this time, with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be, that a colleague encouraged me to start playing chess.

For me, it felt like such a cool thing to do. Chess signals intelligence, and knowing how to play is already something quite fun and impressive, never mind if you can play it well. As someone who shamelessly loves an intellectual challenge, and loves feeling like the smartest person in the room, I found the drive and motivation to get good at this game.

This isn't just a story about chess, though. It's a story of how I found chess to be the key that unlocked my capacity to think with clarity, and strangely, an inspiration that helped me navigate the messiness of life.

1. Chess is a low-stakes arena to examine my darkest shadow
2. Chess is logical thinking that helps me excel at basically anything
3. Chess taught me the essence of stoicism before I even knew what stoicism was

Chess is a low-stakes arena to examine my darkest shadow

"Shadow work" is a self-reflection practice based on the ideas of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. The goal is to become aware of the parts of yourself that you tend to hide, deny or suppress, your "shadow."

When life feels too real to separate myself from it, chess comes in handy to help me see the parts of myself I'd rather hide from and reject.

Here's my problem. I have such a strong emotional tie to my "real" life that it obstructs me from analysing it objectively, which is completely fair enough. In a way, we might often find ourselves easy and quick to come up with good advice for others but can’t seem to replicate the same clarity when it comes to ourselves. 

There's so much emotional weight I put into any given situation in life, and into myself. I care about myself, I care about how I come across to other people, am I coming across as rude or embarassing, and when something inconvenient happens, I get frustrated like any other human being. There's the stubbornness, pride and perfectionism, all holding tightly onto the idea of what I've constructed as "myself", in other words, my ego.

And then there's chess.

A game.

Something I fully understand for what it is: a game. Sixty-four squares, an eight by eight board, thirty-two pieces. White makes the first move, and you win by leaving no safe square for the opponent's king to move to.

It's not really real life, is it? There are no bills to pay, no work to go to, no stranger on the bus talking too loudly.

A game of chess is clean, with the only variables being the pieces, the rules, and the two people moving them.

Interestingly, what this creates is a clean-room environment, an arena, that exposes me and my true emotions and abilities, without the complicated variables real life throws in. Have I hurt this person's feelings? Have I made a decision that isn't what my partner wants? I feel happy, I feel unhappy, and so on.

If you were to ask me why I like the game of chess, it's easy for me to say: I love playing a smart game, I love being smart.

What it also revealed to me is my shadows, comically accurate, plain and easy to digest.

• I overthink so much that I can't make a move
• I hate it so much when I've made a mistake
• I feel awful when I make a silly move and when I lose the game, because I convince myself I'm the most stupid person in the world, and it's so embarrassing
• I dilly dally so much trying to build up to the best and smartest move

All of these traits and habits are quite the mirror of what I struggle with in real life too.

I strive to meet any challenge that requires "being smart." I put so much pressure on being smart and perfect that I end up buried in stress and weight. I postpone making decisions because they're not up to my standard, and end up doing nothing at all.

These shadows have been holding me back in winning and improving my game play. In this low-stakes arena, where even the rules are written out for me, I have fully realised and accepted that I am my own biggest enemy.

Similarly in life, no matter how many self-help books or how much advice people give me, I won't be able to achieve my goals as effectively and frictionlessly as I want, because of myself and my shadow.

Chess has given me the clarity to see this, and helped me make the most important move, which is self-awareness.

Chess is logical thinking that helps me excel at basically anything

What happens in a game of chess? You make one move after another, until there are no more moves to be made.

That's the most painstakingly simple idea I just can't seem to apply to real life.

I have the patience and awareness to examine every move I make in a game of chess.

"My pawn is under attack, the opponent's bishop can take it, I have nothing to defend this pawn with, which pieces can I move to defend it. But instead of defending, can I threaten another, more important piece of theirs. And before I make a decision, let me play out the next five best moves my opponent could make. Lastly, are the rest of my pieces protected, is my king in danger."

I don't think like this when I need to deal with a tricky situation in real life. If I trace my thought pattern, it goes something like this instead.

“I am swamped at work, I feel really stressed, I can't deal with this, ugh, more stuff coming in for me, I'll just take a breath and stay a bit later.”

I was led by my emotions, which is something I also found to be one of my shadows through chess. When I get stressed and frustrated, I start playing like I'm trying to lose, just to get out of this hell faster. It's a path of self-destruction and lashing out, not unlike people throwing things around when they're emotional.

I often don't think like a winner, and it's such a blessing to know that now, because I'm no longer controlled by it.

Rarely do I have the clarity to stop and ask myself: right, what would a winner do?

To use the same scenario, a winner would first want to avoid staying late at work or becoming so stressed in the first place. Then a winner would think about how to achieve that. Then a winner would come up with a series of actions to get there: push back non-priority deadlines, delegate, communicate with managers to find more resources.

The stress and underperformance in my life came from a false sensation of a loss of control, from the lack of a clear action plan. I'm very blessed and privileged in life, and I can't be so arrogant as to say this is the secret to everything, when I don't know half of it.

What I can say is that my life has improved since I started treating difficult situations like a chess game.

To put it into context, it's about having a clear picture of the problem, the goal, the variables, the risks and the actions available to me.

It's not a new thing, using chess as an analogy for great practices in strategic thinking. It's highly transferable, from business to football.

It's a way of occupying my mind with a reliable structure for problem-solving and finding the best outcome, whenever I need it, rather than being led by a string of emotions that I sometimes find unhelpful.

Chess taught me the essence of stoicism before I even knew what stoicism was

Here are a few core things I learned from chess, including what I've already mentioned above.

• Think rationally, informed by logic and reason. Emotion gives direction, not decisions
• How I react to difficulty and failure is what makes a winner
• I am what I can control, and what I can control is my actions, my next moves
• Expect things not to go as planned in a game of chess, and accept that I will never truly know exactly what will happen
• Practice, understand what went wrong, implement the learnings, and repeat

Coincidentally, a lot of Stoic teaching translates directly to what I'd already learned.

Stoicism is an ancient philosophy founded in Greece and later developed by Roman thinkers. Its core idea is that the key to a good life is focusing on what you can control, accepting what you cannot, and cultivating virtue: courage, fairness, self-control.

It wasn't until very recently, years after my journey of self-development through chess began, that I started reading about stoicism properly.

You can’t imagine how much it spoke to me. I felt totally validated, finally able to embrace this part of myself which I call "functional meditation."

Functional meditation, much like the common misconception around stoicism that it's about rejecting emotions, is actually far from that.

Emotions will always be part of what makes creatures intelligent and sentient. To renounce and reject them completely would deplete the whole point of our experience on earth.

But what makes humans different from all the other sentient creatures is our ability to question and think about our own thoughts and feelings, our introspection, our questioning of our own instincts, as well as our capacity for imagination.

In other words, it's the ability to observe our emotions, to hold ourselves back from acting purely on instinct or feeling, and to imagine an outcome we prefer, along with the actions that would get us there.

If anything, this adds a huge extra layer to what people mean when they say "be human" (which often just means, it's okay to feel something).

What it actually means is: be human, feel your emotions, accept your emotions, observe them, and then choose your actions.

That's what "functional meditation" is, another functional layer on top of traditional meditation which focuses on observing your emotions and choose our reactions to them. Functional meditation is the clarity of knowing what we want, and how to get there.

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Clarity candle serves as a tonic for the times my head is spinning and foggy. Its soul is built from everything chess has taught me, and its substance is infused with plants known to help with mental fatigue and a clouded mind, cool and clean notes designed to alleviate the noisiness in life.

This candle often lives on my desk, the same desk where I've suffered the most in life, due to a demanding career that exists entirely outside my candle adventure. Its quiet presence has reminded me, more times than I can count, to think with clarity, to stay grounded, and to play a difficult situation like a game of chess. One move at a time, without needing to know exactly how the game will end.

From, 

Yaya