Endgame

The term endgame gets thrown around a lot lately.  Whether it be in politics, the military, personal relationships, sports, business deals, or even just in a simple task, the term endgame seems to come up a lot.  However, most people do not know what the term means and what it’s lexicological meanings are.

Endgame generally refers to a stage in the game of chess, after most of the pieces have been removed from the board and only a few remain.  When used in this sense, the term also carries connotations of psychological strength and the ability to maintain composure under pressure.

The terms is also thrown around in terms of politics and war in a very similar sense.  Lately I have even heard President Obama use it to refer to the war in Afghanistan and the next 2 years.  In this sense, the connotations are more important than the definition.

How does America disentangle itself from a fairly big mess that it has gotten itself into in the middle east?

Flat out leaving has stopped being an option long ago.

Protecting the Afghan and Iraqi people indefinitely is also out of the question as the cost would cripple our economy.

So, the endgame is inevitable.  This is a win or lose strategy, but you can wipe out your enemy, but still lose.  What a lot of people are missing and this is a hard concept to get a grasp on is that this is not a matter of us against them.  We barely understand who them is, and as shown by the shooting at Fort Hood last month, one of us can easily become one of them.

What can you do to have a good endgame.  First, measure your available resources.  Even the best chess player can lose a game that they should have won if they get careless at the end.  In the same way, you can win campaign after campaign and then get bogged down in insurgencies and lose the war due to inability to bring your overwhelming forces to bear on the enemy.

Second, in order to have a good endgame, you have to realize that the game needs to end.  With that in mind, you need to have a plan of how you will end it.  The emphasis there is that you will end the game and not that the game will end with you as a player.  Once you have come to accept that as your reality, you will be able to plan and act on your plan.

Finally, stick to your plan.  This does not mean that if it is not working, you should just keep going, but rather that you should not change things that are working simply for the sake of change. If a strategy is working, keep at it, you might just be on to something.

You might be asking yourself what in the heck it is that I am trying to get at here.  Well, simply put, endgames are a fact of life.  We all have to experience them and we should all be prepared to do so in a manner that benefits us and which does not stress or hurt us.  When looking at something, think of how the process will end, because things end, all things end.