3. A parable —
My mother likes to tell a story about a time when she was playing a children’s card game with a few of my siblings. Each card had an ability, and the object of the game was to use your cards' abilities to attack your opponents' cards until they lost their hand. There was one type of card that was particularly valuable, because it made its holder temporarily invulnerable to attack. For this reason, any player who got their hands on one of these cards would treasure it above all else. But one of my sisters played differently. Whenever she came across one of these cards, she found a way to give it away to whichever opponent she thought most needed it.
This strategy mortified my mother. She tried repeatedly to explain the rules of the game to her daughter, to point out to her that she was only sabotaging herself by giving her most valuable cards away. But my sister didn't care; she understood the rules, but she simply liked giving the cards away. She found the way everyone else played the game to be a bit too zero-sum, so she chose to play in her own way. Whether or not the game’s rules crowned her the winner, she would be happy, because she found joy in the way she played the game.
In the end, my sister won the game. When my mother tells this story, she kind of just ends it there, with an incredulous expression ("Can you believe it?"). She remains mystified by her daughter's play-style, but you can tell that she was somehow affected by it, because she keeps telling the story. And every time she tells it, she's beaming with pride.
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