The Game of Life and How to Play It

Shinn opens by refusing the usual metaphor. Most people consider life a battle, she writes, but it is not a battle, it is a game. A game cannot be won by force. It can be played well or badly depending on whether you know the rules.

She was a working illustrator in New York who became a New Thought teacher in middle age, and this was her first book, published in 1925. It is the most practical of the New Thought classics because it is built out of cases: people came to her with a specific problem, and she tells you what was said and what happened.

What is in the book

Ten chapters: The Game, The Law of Prosperity, The Power of the Word, The Law of Nonresistance, The Law of Karma and the Law of Forgiveness, Casting the Burden, Love, Intuition or Guidance, Perfect Self-Expression, Denials and Affirmations.

The first rule is giving and receiving. Whatever a person sends out in word or deed returns to them: give criticism and receive it, give love and receive it. She takes this literally enough to be uncomfortable, and it is the frame the rest of the book hangs on.

The second is the spoken word, which is her real subject. She treats speech as an instrument with consequences rather than a report on how you feel, and most of her cases turn on getting someone to stop describing out loud the thing they fear. Her affirmations are written the way a lawyer writes a clause: the wording matters, and a vague one is worse than none.

Nonresistance is the hardest instruction in the book. Her word for declining the fight a situation is inviting you into, on the grounds that resisting a thing feeds it. The chapter on casting the burden is the practical companion to it.

And intuition, which she treats as a sense to be trained and acted on rather than a mood to be discussed. The coaching edition is a good place to test that against something you are actually deciding this week.

Florence Scovel Shinn

Shinn came to this work late and from an unlikely direction, having spent her earlier career as an artist and book illustrator. Her writing carries none of the heaviness of her contemporaries: it is brisk, anecdotal, occasionally funny, and it moves.

She summarised her own philosophy in a line about the vibratory power of words: whatever a person voices, they begin to attract. Whether you take that as metaphysics or as a sharp observation about attention and habit, the practice she builds on it is the same.