A Pawn is a Queen-in-Waiting

I recently finished Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. The book follows a woman named Nora who gets the chance to explore all the lives she might have lived if she’d made different choices. It’s a beautiful premise on its own. But the thing that really got me? The chess.

Chess runs through the story as a metaphor, and it landed hard, probably because I’ve been learning to play on Duolingo (yes, they teach chess now, and yes, my streak is alive and well past 3,200 days, thank you very much).

In the book, Nora’s personal sherpa, Mrs. Elm, reminds her of how she used to play chess as a kid. She would lose her strongest pieces early and then basically give up, convinced the game was already lost. Sound familiar? I think most of us have had that moment in life. The moment where we look at what’s left on the board and think, “Well, that’s it. Game over.”

But here’s the thing. The game is never over until it’s actually over.

Even a single pawn still on the board means there is still a game to play. And a pawn, as Mrs. Elm points out, is never just a pawn. It’s a queen-in-waiting. All it has to do is keep moving forward. One square at a time.

I love that image. Because so many of us discount our remaining options when things get hard. We lose the job. The relationship ends. The deal falls through. The diagnosis arrives. And we look at what we have left and see only pawns. Small. Ordinary. Not enough.

But what if that’s exactly wrong?

The book also makes an important point about possibility. At the start of a chess game, there is exactly one way to set up the board. After just a few moves, millions of variations exist. After a few more, billions. The number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. Every single move opens a new world of possibility.

Every. Single. Move.

That’s true in chess, and it’s true in life. Every conversation you start, every introduction you make, every time you show up and say yes (or no) to something, you are making a move. And that move creates possibilities that didn’t exist a moment before.

So, the next time you look at your board and feel like you’re out of options, remember: you’re not. You’re just looking at pawns and forgetting what they can become. Keep moving forward. One square at a time. One conversation, one connection, one choice.

Because it ain’t over ’til it’s over. And a pawn is never just a pawn.

Happy Networking!