How to Be Happy #29: Invent Strange Boardfellows

You know how it is. You’re flipping through channels and can’t find anything that holds your attention for more than seven seconds. You try the Xfinity-encouraged “What should I watch?” voice command and get “Perfect Picks for Every Sign.” Clicking the Virgo button, you see recommendations such as NBC Nightly News and Hannity. (This must be because “Virgo individuals are blessed with powerful intelligence and are always ready to expand their knowledge reserves,” although the Hannity choice seems to call this into question. Anyway, I must have been behind the door when they handed out those qualities to my Virgo class since none of these choices appeal.)

Fortunately, I stumbled across something while doom scrolling that may provide audiovisual succor: chess boxing. Chess boxing is a sportmanteau, a blending of two distinct activities — in this case, chess and boxing — to form a new one. It is one of many odd sports flying under the ESPN radar. Toe wrestling, anyone? Or wife-carrying? Or extreme ironing (see below)?

“Mom always told me you can never go wrong with permanent press. But did I listen?”

As you might surmise, chess boxing involves two “combatants” who alternate three-minute rounds of fisticuffs and speed chess until one wins by checkmate or knockout. It was invented by a French comic book artist, turned into performance art by a Dutch person, and then grew into a competitive sport popular in such places as Finland. Sadly, it seems you can only watch chess boxing via short clips on YouTube.

All this prompts me to revise an old adage, “Necessity is the mother of all invention,” to “Boredom is the mother of all invention.” According to Psychology Today, boredom, the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest, comes about for eight reasons. The one that jumps out to me is this: “Individuals lacking the inner resources to deal with boredom constructively will rely on external stimulation. In the absence of inner amusement skills, the external world will always fail to provide enough excitement and novelty.”

So, the opposite must be true also. People with an abundance, perhaps an overabundance, of inner amusement skills come up with sportmanteau ideas like chess boxing. This revelation offers another way to keep the borester [monster of boredom] at bay and, thus, be happy. Come up with your own ideas for combining chess with other sports or activities and then get your friends and family to participate. I’ll try a few to get you started:

• Chess diving — Participants play chess while scuba diving. The loser is the one who gets checkmated or runs out of air first.
• Chess lawnmowing — Participants alternate rounds of chess with mowing equal-sized lawns. The winner is the one who achieves checkmate or finishes cutting the grass first.
• Chess drinking — Participants must down a shot every time they take an opponent’s piece. The loser is the one who gets checkmated or blacks out first.

I think it works! For the two minutes or so it took me to create the list above, I was not bored in the least and very pleased with the results and myself. As you can see, it (luckily) does not take much to amuse me.