Candy Crush and PSP

Candy Crush and PSP????  I wasn’t sure what kind of post to write tonight. I tried multiple versions. I even started a Google Sheet on Anticipatory Grief, which I’ll share another time. Why? I felt especially anxious about the future for no good reason, other than a couple of difficult moments in what had otherwise been a lovely day.

But I sat writing for what seemed like forever, couldn’t find the words, and eventually decided to go to bed and start fresh in the morning.

And then I saw the message at 2am my time.

A very close friend, someone I love dearly, sent me a picture. This is a person who would literally do anything for me, and I for him. Beyond the humour, the passion, and the fierce loyalty he brings to everything, he has a secret ingredient: persistence and resilience. He just keeps going. And when I say passion, I mean it in the fullest sense. This is someone who shows up. Who cares. Who brings an energy into a room, into a friendship, into life itself, that is impossible to manufacture and impossible to ignore. With all of that though, he gets important things done for the community around him and continually delivers for other people, albeit in a low key, no ego way.

He has been playing Candy Crush for years. Long after almost everyone else I know abandoned it, long after the rest of the human race stopped caring how many levels there are. I’ve downloaded it, deleted it, redownloaded it and deleted it again. I didn’t even think it was still a thing. It’s buried somewhere in my app graveyard. Out of curiosity tonight, I actually retrieved it from the cloud to check where I’d left off. Level 483. I rest my case.

But there he was. He had finally, after years of absolute persistence, reached level 10,000.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The truth is, I was unbelievably impressed. Think about what that actually means. 273 million people play this game every single month. The app has been downloaded 3.6 billion times. And according to my research, just 973 people have ever earned the badge for reaching level 10,000. 973, out of billions. My friend is one of them. Level 483 certainly won’t be troubling the record books. But level 10,000? That is really something.

Three reasons why this matters to me.

First: persistence is an indispensable characteristic for those of us living with a terminal illness, and for our carers. It is a day-in, day-out job. We keep pushing, keep going, level to level, as the disease progresses.

Second: if you set your mind to something, you can achieve things you’d never have imagined possible. Now, of course, each of us has to choose what we set our minds to. My mind is set to slightly different things. But the principle stands, and it is still amazing.

Third: I once wrote a post about squeezing the last drops from a tube of toothpaste, using every ounce of capacity and capability you have, right until it runs out. And then not letting it run out. Keeping on squeezing. I believe that he has another 11,000 levels to go so his tube is still very much squeezable.

I am not for a single moment comparing Candy Crush to PSP. That is not the point, and it would be wrong to even go there. My friend has had his own trials and tribulations, as we all have. Life deals every one of us difficult hands in its own way. The point is simply this: that day by day, level by level, challenge by challenge, we can carry on. Or at the very least, we can do our best. And sometimes, doing your best is everything there is.

But today, that picture overrode my grief spreadsheets and went straight to my heart.

Sheer persistence. Sheer bloody-mindedness. Sheer — I’m not quite sure what. That is the order of the day as I fight on with PSP, fully knowing the consequences, fully knowing the outcome, but squeezing every last ounce of life out of the journey in the process.

Candy Crush isn’t for me. Level 483 tells you everything you need to know about that. But I’m hoping I can compensate for it in other areas.

If there’s a special reward for those who reach level 10,000 in Candy Crush, then those hours deserve to count for something, especially given the location where I imagine most of them were spent. For today, for now, for this moment, thank you, my friend, for the most unexpected, out-of-left-field therapeutic gift you could have given me. Thank you for the passion. Thank you for the compassion. Thank you for being exactly who you are, at exactly the moment I needed it.

Bottom line: I needed a friend who didn’t even know I needed him at that moment, and he was there for me. In the most bizarre way imaginable, but there nonetheless. Friendship can be like that. And when it is, it is everything.

P.S. As I’ve said above, I in no way mean to trivialise PSP in any way, nature, or form, but I needed to find a positive angle to start the day in a better place. Some people may see this as me avoiding, but it gave me a genuine smile, and it’s that smile I want to focus on.