To Be Really Powerfull

To be really powerful, love what you have.  To know but one good rook ending, or twenty, not 1,000, not buying ten ending books--what a concept!  To sit in your own galoshes.

Maybe even read a trashy old endgame book till the binding disintegrates, surpassed by nineteen new slick endgame books by Gambit or Batesford or DVD's by chessBase, or chessCafe's Russell Enterprises.  Yes, all fantastic.  But I say the search is over.  Work with what you have--but I say, 'Please Lord, let me finally do some REAL work'.

Shinryu Suzuki in his classic Zen Mind, Beginners Mind described it well: To paint a bamboo, become a bamboo. It takes great skill to grasp totalities simply; to be really simple, it takes an act of much sophistication cultivated by great reduction. 

Let us use what we have, not run and get more.  More what?  Distraction as Blaise Pascal called it.  

Years ago, I set out with great infatuation to collect chess classic games.  I did so.  First 350, then 932, then compiling 1,500+ of the certifiably agreed upon greatest, most stunning, exemplary chess games EVER played, till I gushed out all over the place at as many as 5,020, my current mushroomed, swelling collection.  

When it was carefully firm at 932 games, I had viewed or studied each and every one of them.  But after 1.5K, I lost my way.  More is less.  Become bamboo, don't run and buy ten bamboo photo albums.  Be a bamboo.  A single bamboo.