In chess as in life everyone is either underrated or overrated. Players are either ascending or descending. The reality of this as it plays out on the board highlights the one element of chance in the game.

When meeting an opponent there is as equal a chance that he or she is, at that exact moment, either continually or suddenly, ascendant as there is that he or she is, either continually or abruptly, headed into the abyss.

Lately everybody I’ve been playing is on the rise and, in my opinion, playing better than they are rated. A memory now is my last winning streak when fate brought me quite the opposite, and high rated players were hanging pieces and suffering from mouse slips.

Experiencing protracted streaks in either direction makes me want to give away my points. To sit at the board and resign before moving time and again until my rating drops to zero.

When I’m winning and my rating is climbing, I covet points and am reluctant to play. It runs against my true nature to covet.

When I am losing, the awareness of the loss of points piggybacks the sense of devastation felt when meticulously-laid plans are dashed. Both crush confidence.

Indeed, the lesson of both the losing and the winning streak is that the game is purest when the awareness of points is obliterated and the player plays only the board.

Too long we’ve been playing for points.

This reality manifested nicely at work Friday, payday. The restaurant is one month old but has been open for only one week. All the cooks have put in at least one full week of work. The month is new and the moon is full. At home, bills sit in their envelopes. Landlords wait. And alas the pay schedule is two weeks behind, meaning that everyone is getting paid for the work done almost a month ago, when we were working four-hour days setting up the kitchen, building shelves and testing ovens.

When the checks were distributed frowns abounded and suspicion flickered behind tired eyes. Cooks who last week worked six twelve-hour shifts received paychecks for 20 hours. Tension cut the smell of key lime pies and citrus-marinated roasted chicken.

Coworker John, who is reading The Kybalion, pointed out how the experience was but a microcosm of the macrocosm. “The machine is breaking down,” he said as he scooped avocado flesh from its skin.

The workers are becoming aware of how small and meaningless their paychecks are, of how they are being robbed.

Nevertheless the work continued.

The working logic was no matter what the reason was for the disturbance, there is a job to do and when the job is complete then the time will come to sort out what happened and what should happen next.

Generally speaking, people behave largely logical in times like these, during lulls in solar activity. When the solar storm cycle ebbs, the sun’s release of Carbon-14 increases, spurring tree growth as is indicated by fatter rings spaced further apart. When the solar storm cycle is ascendant, tree growth slows and human behavior becomes more anomalous.

Former Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan in “Dragons of Eden” emphasized the implications of this. A warden of an insane asylum once sought to determine the cause of anomalous behavior pattern outbreaks exhibited seemingly simultaneously and spontaneously among the inmates. Almost uniformly and synchronistically the entire population of the asylum would suddenly be prone to outbursts, spats of violence, sleeping and eating disturbances and other behavioral abnormalities. He began eliminating variables. It wasn’t the diet. It wasn’t visitation scheduling. It wasn’t specific days of the week or month. It wasn’t phases of the moon.

Sunspots and solar storms, the warden concluded, were inspiring atypical behavioral outbursts.

Sunspots inspire similar behavior in mother Earth, according to Robert W. Felix in “Not by Fire but by Ice.”

“During solar flares and for two to six hours after, our magnetic field suddenly increases 20 to 30 gammas, causing massive magnetic storms. The storms disrupt electronic communications and cause fade-outs in shortwave radio emissions. In power lines, fluctuating magnetic fields caused by sunspots can produce large electrical currents. Sometimes, said Patrick Huyghe, in Science Digest, erupting flares cause electrical surges in the ground itself. In the ground itself! (Emphasis his.)”

The solar storm cycle is currently ascendant. This while the Earth’s magnetosphere is currently weak and descendant. Solar storms and sunspots are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. The streak is expected to climax in 2012.

One wonders if we will still be playing for points by then.