I’ll admit it:  I love playing Candy Crush.  I love even more that it cuts me off and makes me wait when I fail 5 times and run out of lives.

I don’t believe in paying for those extra lives and boosts.  I take them when I get them from the wheel of fortune and use them until I don’t have them.

Once I stopped playing completely for about a year because I was getting obsessed and upset and stuck.  When I came back to the game, I found I had a whole new viewpoint about playing it:  it’s a game, no point in getting upset.  And then several weeks into playing it again, I had a very big aha!  (and a great excuse to keep playing it because every time I play, win or lose, I am reminded that Candy Crush is a microcosm of life).

Candy Crush Lesson 1

Sometime the game takes skill and recognizing patterns, sometimes the game is mostly luck, and sometimes Grace hands you just the boost you need to get to the next level.

Candy Crush Lesson 2

Getting to the next level can be fun, surprising, frustrating, time consuming, seemingly futile and all of the foregoing at once.  That’s just the way the game works

Candy Crush Lesson 3

Gather up the wheel of fortune prizes one by one until you have some at hand, gather up the candies which will give another prize or prizes to add to your stash – simply keep storing and one day you will need a boost and there it will be waiting for you.  Some days boosts don’t really do anything but help you hang on to hope about getting to the next level.

Candy Crush Lesson 4

If you persist, just keep on playing steady and true, you WILL get to the next level.  Since I decided to persist and not get aggrevated at  distinctly unassailable levels, I found that I get there eventually.  Maybe not in the time I had in mind, but in the time it takes me to gather my supplies and figure out patterns and wait for a bit of luck, I do get there.

Candy Crush Lesson 5

All of the above applies to the game of life.  Because life IS a game!  Sometimes grace falls down on us and we swim along; sometimes obstacles grow into unclimbable mountains but if we take them on one step at a time eventually we find ourselves at the top – then it’s back into the next valley but this time with a view from the pinnacle to spur us on.

Candy Crush Lesson 6

The journey is the process.  Each game and each level teaches us something new that will help in future levels, and sometimes you repeat former levels but with experience and knowledge that helps you through them faster (I play on my Kindle – at the end of each short passage of games I have to pass 3 24-hour challenges to get to the next level).

I have to tell you, I wonder if they had this planned all along!