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How Game Theory Can Help Heal a Broken Heart
Ever been homesick for a place that wasn’t home?
“The party’s over
But I’ve landed on my feet
And I’m standing here on this corner
Where there used to be a street.”
Leonard Cohen, A Street
My heart was broken
Usually, when people say that, they’re talking about losing another person. A romance turned sour, or a relationship cut short by death, the way all the best relationships are doomed to be.
But we grow out of this world, don’t we? Grown on granite like constellations of lichen or twisting from deep roots like a deathless forest bent over by the wind. If you’ve never had the experience of falling deeply in love with a particular corner of this earth, your space on it is wasted.
Besides, just like with people, what we really love most often is not the place itself, but the people we were in it.
The answer is usually in the forest. In places that don’t speak in words. Nearly two decades earlier, I had moved to Vancouver, reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano on the plane that took me away from the only home I had ever known, never to really return.