Takeshi's castle

Just watched “Takeshi’s castle” with my seven year old and husband. It  is a program that airs on a children’s channel called POGO.  Mirth and laughter for a whole 30 minutes, a great way to spend time with the family. Participants move from challenge to challenge in this quirky Japanese game show, till the last one or few remain standing. The challenges or games are creative amusement park type adventures, designed mainly to test physical balance and fitness, with some amount of intelligence being required and a whole lot of luck .

 The first game was a bunch of folks running at break neck speed, with a helmet on and some mildly protective clothing, at a phalanx of doors. The participant hurtles towards the row of doors, and throws himself at any one of the doors he randomly choses, with childlike and reckless abandon. Now as it turns out, in the row of seven doors, only one is made of thin cardboard, while the other six are wood. If he happens to pick the right door he bursts through to the other side, rolling on the grass and tumbling, only to be confronted by the second row of doors to do the same thing again. There are six such rows of doors. If he chooses the wrong door however he falls back, propelled by the wood, and presumably nursing hurt pride and body. Not so it would appear, from what happened on screen. The participants were always smiling no matter what the outcome was. Dusting themselves off gleefully and running off to find another door to throw themselves at. It was a game! They were having fun! And there was always that childlike fearlessness, no-holds barred speeding, as they charged at the doors again and again and again…..this was just a game, at the end of it they got to go home.  

Why can we not live life like that? Treat life like a game. Hurtle away at our perceived obstacles with fearlessness, smile and laugh whether we get past or not. Get up and throw ourselves at the blocks again and again, enjoying the process whether we tumbled over, this side or that. For at the end we get to go home too. But if we lived, like they play at Takeshi’s castle, chances are we will find that the home we go to at the end, is not much different from the life we lived anyway.

Jai Guru Dev