"Was that a good move?" I asked Sensei hopefully.
He smiled. "Good move. Bad move. All is next move."
I was taken aback for an instant. Then I realized Sensei had shared one of the most important lessons in Go, and in life.
Please join me over the fold for more....
Go is perhaps the oldest board game on earth. It originated over 4000 years ago in China, and while its epicenter remains in Asia - China, Korea, and Japan in particular - it is played around the world. I became fascinated with the game in high school after reading a novel where it was featured. Two years later, as a young Marine in Okinawa, I wandered into a Go club near the base, and began to learn.
Like many of the best games, Go "takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master." The rules are simple, but the play itself so subtle that even the best computer Go programs rank only with strong amateurs. It is a game of tradition and tactics, shape and strategy, position and patience, calculation and courage.
So I played. And I lost, despite handicap stones. I fumbled. Guessed. When I told Sensei I'd begun to dream of Go - flowing shapes of black and white stones - he smiled and said, "Now you start to learn."
And learn I did. The learning curve on Go is very non-linear. At the start it rises sharply; the rules are simple enough that you can learn them and start play in 30 minutes. But then confusion sets in as every gambit you try gets crushed. Then comes another breakthrough - and Sensei was right; it happens when you start dreaming the game - where you no longer see individual stones but rather shapes, shapes that are alive, shapes that could live, and shapes that are already dead. Then the learning curve flattens again for a time, until the next breakthrough, when you begin to see how shapes interact, support, or threaten one another.
It was about at this point, during a game with Sensei, that I saw ... something. Something I would have missed only a week before. And more, I saw what I thought was a way to fix it. I placed my stone, and heard Sensei release that distinctively Japanese sigh, the tip of his tongue behind his front teeth so the sigh emerged as a quiet hiss.
"Was that a good move?" I asked Sensei hopefully.
He smiled. "Good move. Bad move. All is next move."
I was taken aback for an instant. Then I realized Sensei had shared one of the most important lessons in Go, and in life. For in Go, there's rarely an inarguably "good" move. It's all in whether and how you follow up on a move. Placing a dagger stone, threatening an enemy group, can be brilliant or stupid. It can be a Ko threat that, used later, can save an otherwise hopeless position. It can also be a distraction, gaining a tiny territory while your opponent gobbles up a huge tract. It can seize the initiative (sente), or surrender it (gote). It's all in the follow through.
In a very real sense, Sensei was asking me to expand my concept of time, to think beyond the now, to see each decision in the context of history and follow through. Each decision is part of a flow, and rarely does any single act decisively shift that flow. Sensei taught me to visualize the board differently, not a static moment awaiting the next play, but a dynamic, living space that evolved, not stone by stone but continuing impulse by continuing impulse, some completed, others let to rest until the rule of Ko called them to center stage.
For, more often than not, a game of Go will turn on a Ko fight, where an unanswered move will give life or take it. It will come down to who has more Ko threats - attacks left unfinished, waiting for the right moment - and whose Ko threats endanger or protect the most critical positions. The players exchange threats and ripostes - I will live here and you will live there - until one player has no threats left to offer, or none that would outweigh the critical Ko. He must concede the Ko and, likely, the game.
Life - and I think politics as well - follow a similar pattern. Much of what we do is laying groundwork, creating opportunities that will yield a better menu of options at some critical juncture. Oftentimes, pursuing a given impulse to its conclusion will distract rather than enable us. And more often than not, Sensei's answer would apply to any decision we make:
"Good move. Bad move. All is next move."