Opinion - Joe Bennett: The pool ball theory of life explained

After the break in a game of pool, the ball will roll to its ordained position and nobody, not even God, can stop it, writes Northern Advocate columnist Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Images

We all need a new theory of life from time to time. Here's one. It's the game of pool theory. It'll take a while to introduce. Bear with me (or just dive to the last three paragraphs, but hey, you'll be missing rubies).

A kid's just got in touch. He's coming to the city where I live and he asked me out to dinner at a restaurant. No, I said, I'll cook. That's great, he emailed back, and thank you, and can I have a big vodka martini on arrival? Of course, I said. (I've never made a vodka martini, but its ingredient list doesn't sound too mysterious.)

The kid, as maybe you've inferred, isn't a kid. But he was when I last saw him which was 30 something years ago in Canada where I ran, after a fashion, the boarding house he lived in. I was in my mid-20s. He was about 15.

Some kids you warm to. He was one. Tow-haired, of open disposition, bright, smiling, argumentative in an engaging way, a kid trying out the mind he'd found himself in possession of in the manner of someone test-driving a high-powered car. He would take contrary positions for the sake of taking them, for the fun of trying to maintain them, arguing with earnestness while knowing it was just a game, like the wrestling of lion cubs that teaches them the adult skill of killing.

A friend with a mathematical bent once told me our sense of time accelerating, of each year passing faster than its predecessor until we reach the point that I'm at now where they whizz past like cars along the motorway, is logarithmic. I don't know what that means but I believe it. And I hope that it explains why I remember 30-something years ago more vividly that I remember last week.

And if I remember 30-something years ago with vividness, how much more vivid it must have been for the lad who is coming to visit. He was in his teens, away from home, beset with puberty and forging an identity among his peers. That's fundamental stuff. Which is the main reason I liked teaching. The kids you deal with are properly alive. Stuff matters. The graph of their existence has Himalayan up and downs - as opposed to the coastal plain of flat maturity.

(If you're wondering when the pool game theory of life is coming, be patient now. It's on the way.)

The kid's done well. He was always going to. He is now the vice-president (whatever that may mean. I do not understand the hierarchies of commerce) of an American corporation so vastly global in its reach that more people on the planet have heard of it than haven't. He flies around the world first-class in dateless placeless luxury, hopping from country to country, continent to continent, stopping off just long enough in each location to do whatever it is that vice-presidents do before moving on again. I do not envy him the work, though doubtless he is paid far more than any schoolteacher.

I know already how our dinner date will go. He'll marvel at how old and fat I've got, but will not say so. I'll marvel at his metamorphosis from child to middle-aged executive, and will, after a fashion, say so.

I'll ask after his wife and kids (of whom the eldest is now almost of the age at which I knew her father) and he will show me photographs. We'll reminisce a bit.

And then we'll talk of his contemporaries. Do you remember Blank, he'll say and I'll say, Blank! Of course I do. And he'll say, guess what's become of him and I will guess. And four times out of five I will be right. Why? Because of the game of pool theory. (See, I keep my promises.)

Life's like a game of pool. God breaks. He smacks the cue ball into the pack. The balls go everywhere. They scatter and crash into each other and bounce off cushions and nobody can tell what's going on and everything seems random. That's childhood.

But very soon the energy dissipates, the balls slow down. Perhaps one or two have disappeared into the pockets from which no ball returns. But most are rolling now. And crucially you can see where each is going to finish up. And if you wound the tape back you could understand exactly how it happened, the accidents that formed its nature. But there's no point in doing so. What's done is done. Its character is now decided. And character is destiny. The pool ball will now roll to its ordained position and nobody, not even God, can stop it.

There. The pool ball theory of life. Feel free to claim it for your own.