Keeping Score

Ann Herbert has written a crazy parable about our fixation with numbers and keeping score. Think about test scores, salaries, bank accounts, etc.

In the beginning God didn’t make just one or two people; he made a abunch of us. Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun and he said you can’t really have fun unless there is a whole gang of you. So he put us all in this sort of playground park place called Eden and told us to enjoy.
At first we did have fun just like He expected. We played all the time. We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, climbed trees, swung on the vines, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, hid in the forest, and acted silly. We laughed a lot.
Then one day this snake told us that we weren't having real fun because we weren’t keep score. Back then we didn’t know what score was. When he explained it, we still couldn’t see the fun. But he said that we should give an apple to the person who was best at playing and we’d never know who was best unless we kept score. We could all see the fun of that. We were all sure we were the best.
It was different after that. We yelled a lot. We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games to be played. Other games, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score. By the time God found out about our new fun, we were spending about forty-five minutes a day in actual playing and the rest of the time working out the score. God was wroth about that –very very wroth.
He said we couldn’t use his garden anymore because we weren’t having any fun. We said we were having lots of fun and we were. He shouldn’t have got upset just because it wasn’t exactly the kind of fun He had in mind.
God wouldn’t listen. He kicked us out and said we couldn’t come back until we stopped keeping score. To rub it in (to get our attention, He said), He told us we were all going to die anyway, and our scores wouldn’t mean anything.
God was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 16,548 and that means a lot to me. If I can raise it to 20,000 before I die, I will know I have accomplished something. Even if I can’t, my life has a great deal of meaning because I have taught my children to score high and they will all be able to reach 20,000 or even 30,000, I know.
Really, life in Eden didn't mean anything. Fun is great in its place, but without scoring there is no reason for it. . . We are all very grateful to the snake.