Hitting walls and tree trunks, forgetting to slide, diving into a river of crocs, and monsters catching up

For someone who does not own an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, I'm pretty addicted to the Temple Run game. It's a fairly simple game with fairly simple rules: your character runs endlessly through the temple with twists and turns and obstacles and monsters running after you. All you have to do is jump, slide, get the coins and power-ups --all while running.

Why I spend an hour playing it on my sister's iPod is pretty simple: the game reminds me of life. When we are born, we are put in this constant race. The race is always versus a whole lot of factors: time, age, ourselves, each other. In the race we're in, we encounter a lot of tree trunks and open pits and walls in the form of situations, experiences, accidents, emergencies, decisions, feelings, reactions, and inaction. In the race we're in, timing is also of significance. If we forget to jump, we don't win. If we jump too early, we land in water. Too late and the monsters will surely catch up. And how does the game stop? You just die. After running for so long, or sometimes you haven't even reached 100 meters, you die. You can't predict at what point your life will stop but for sure it will stop at some point.

Running alone in a temple also tells us that in life we really are truly alone in the battles and races that we face, even if there are six billion people around us. We are alone because we define the pace, the obstacle, the decision every step of the way. Each battle, each race starts out differently and ends differently for each one of us.