Quotes from Jonathan Rowson

Aronian made the interesting point that if I could force a passed a-pawn I might have winning chances

I was beginning to understand that the best kinds of freedom involved choosing your constraints wisely, and claiming them as your own.

Maturing into a viable adulthood is partly about discipline, but it is also about luck. Aldous Huxley famously wrote that experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you. That is profoundly correct. Our life experience is not one event after the other but a series of opportunities to grow by making sense of what is meaningful and what isn't. Some do that better than others.

chess games are rarely lost by oversights but rather by "the failure to apprehend certainties".

Chess is about the experience of passion, intimacy and caring but not in the way we typically use these terms. The game reveals implicit meanings in the idea of love by offering a shift in perspective and context. The point is that metaphors don't function merely as comparisons but more as translations, recreations or re-presentations.

Most of the studies on chess thinking are related to expertise and really they are about perception. they deal with our visual take on positions rather than the thinking as a productive process. Chess ability stems from noticing patterns over time and recognising in related contexts. Patterns are the raw material of the trunking process, they are constellations of pieces that we gradually become to understand as competitively meaningful.

It is a glorious challenge and and the experience is intensely meaningful and rewarding, but happy? Not as such. The deeper point is that children make your life heavier in a way that is experienced by most people as good. Children give your life depth and definition and responsibility.