If you know me very well, then you know my favorite video game ever is “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” (BOTW). BOTW is an open-world action-adventure game that came out in 2017, but I didn’t start playing it until the summer of 2020 when I bought myself the game and a sunshine yellow Nintendo Switch Lite to play it on. That summer, being stuck at home with nothing to do, became one of my favorites because of this game and the joy I found from playing it. (Is it strange to feel nostalgic for our quarantine era?) I put a lot of time and effort into this game, to the point where I 100% completed it — one of my proudest accomplishments, if you’re wondering.
Being snowed in this week gave me the opportunity to sit down and start replaying the main storyline of BOTW with my boyfriend. And while this was wonderful and fun and I enjoyed myself, it just wasn’t striking up the same sense of wanderlust and adventure I felt the first time I played. Rather, it made me more nostalgic for that experience and almost bitter that I would never experience it for the first time again. I know, it sounds silly, but bear with me. Surely you have a favorite book or movie or TV show you wish you could relive for the first time?
As I grow older, I’ve found more and more experiences are starting to feel like that. Even college, at this point, feels like the same events that I am reliving over and over and finding less and less joy in. I have less drive to read for fun because it feels like something I am always having to do for class. My favorite movies are starting to feel boring. I am taking new classes, but my schedule is starting to run together and feels like every other semester. I am yearning for newer, bigger, better experiences that I know cannot happen while I am here.
But that train of thought cannot keep continuing. How wonderful is it that I loved BOTW so much to devote so much effort to it, and how wonderful it is to replay it and enjoy it in a whole new way. How wonderful I can reread the same books that I love, like “Airman” by Eion Colfer or the “Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins, over and over and find a new reason to love them every time. How wonderful that I have seen “The Lego Batman Movie” enough times that I can monologue from it. Yes, it is good that I can look forward to experiencing new things, but so much of my life and your life and our lives is repetitive. I am learning to find the good in the repetition, to relive things and find the joy in them each time, because do we not love a God who also loves repetition? In “Orthodoxy,” G.K. Chesterton writes, “Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony … It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.” I hope I, and any others who have found themselves becoming jaded from the same old repeated experiences, can change our perspectives to find the joy in the repetition of everyday life — and in replaying favorite video games.
