Keep It in Motion, Free Flowing

I've been playing a lot of capture the flag these days; well, not a lot, but once every two weeks for the past month is more than I have grown accustomed to.

Capture the flag is one of those seminal games that will never grow old for me. Something about running around like an idiot to steal a piece of cloth tied to a stick and run it across some imaginary boundary makes this king. The game isn't very structured, there's no real boundaries or restrictions other than the middle line; buses, cars, bikes, sneaking around for miles: it's all legal. There are no jails, just freeze tag style liberation (you stay where you are until someone goes through your legs), flags are kept in the same location - no hiding, and the teams are huge. I don't like to think of it as nostalgia as much as reclaiming an activity that I had allowed to fall to the wayside.

I can't really explain my fixation with this game. I played it as often as possible when I was little and on through my high school years when I could manage it, but at one point I just ran out of people to play with and got to busy to organize it. The nerdy feel-good reason is that playing a game that is based on luck and team work as much as it is on skill for hours on end with fairly cool people helps me form better communication skills while keeping me active. But really, endorphins aside, it's something far more basic, something more than the sweet pleasure of forgetting all my responsibilities, my projects, my work, and my obligations for a few hours.

In the end, it's running like a madman, howling at the top of my lungs, and the rush of pure reckless abandon. That is serenity in its truest form.

-Thomas