the climbing and the falling

a rather cynically chilling metaphor of life, yet sometimes, strangely apt:

'In the game of Snakes and Ladders, the playing board contains a grid of 100 squares - ten down, ten across. With a roll of the dice, each player moves the allotted number of spaces until someone reaches the top square. To make the game interesting, certain squares can either help or harm you; there are ladders which boost your number of spaces, giving you a leg up, and there are snakes which swallow you whole, setting you back. This is where the game contains the idea of death, as do most games; in some versions, landing on a snake denotes starting over from the very beginning, making your chances of winning slim.

In some cultures, the game is a metaphor for life. Life is chance, a roll of the dice. It is pure chance that the player will land on a snake or a ladder after all, and there is no skill to be learned that can increase your odds. Life is monotonous, a set of one hundred straight squares, and you must cross a certain number before you can ascend. But at the same time, life gives you little pushes at times, just as it gives you little falls.

Life is a game of luck.'

----from a fic by sublimeparadigm