What does it feel like to play chess when you're also the pieces?

That's the closest I've come to explaining jiu-jitsu to friends who don't train. Every position has a handful of good moves and a lot of bad ones. Every move you make opens something and closes something else. Good players think a few steps ahead, great players set traps three moves deep, and beginners (me, for a long time) just react to whatever just happened and wonder why they keep losing.

But the chess comparison breaks down pretty fast, and the ways it breaks are the interesting part.

In chess the board is flat. On the mat you're working in three dimensions. It's not just where your arm is, it's the angle of your hips, how high your knee is off the ground, whether your weight is over your opponent or beside them. A grip that's perfect at one angle is useless ten degrees to the left. And then there's the fourth dimension, which is time. Nobody takes turns. Your opponent is moving while you're thinking, and the window for a sweep is open for maybe half a second before it isn't. So it's chess in 4D - three dimensions plus a clock you can't see that never stops.

The first few months of the year I was playing it like slow chess. I'd get into a position and actually think, in words, "okay, his right arm is posted, so I should go for the..." and by the time I'd finished the sentence I was flat on my back. You can't think in sentences at that speed. Your body has to know the answer before your brain finishes asking the question.

Somewhere in the middle of the year something started to shift. I can't point to a day. It was more like the slow realisation that some rounds went by and I hadn't narrated a single thing in my head. I'd feel a weight shift and my hips would already be moving. I'd end up in a position I'd drilled a thousand times and it'd feel less like executing a technique and more like finishing a sentence someone else started.

That's the flow state people talk about, and I'd read about it plenty, but I don't think I'd ever really felt it outside of music. The closest thing I can compare it to is being at a gig when the band locks in, the crowd stops being individual people and becomes one thing moving together, and for a few minutes nobody's checking their phone or thinking about tomorrow. I've had that at indie gigs in Bangalore since my college days (I once painted my face for a Motherjane show, so I've been chasing that feeling for a while). I just never expected to find it with someone's knee on my stomach.

What I love about flow on the mat is that you can't fake it and you can't force it. The harder you try to get into it, the further away it goes. The only way in is through thousands of boring reps, so that when things get fast and chaotic, the reps are there to catch you. There's a lesson in that for pretty much everything I've ever tried to build, but I'll leave it there.

The other thing chess in 4D teaches you is how to read people. A good roll is really a conversation. Your partner's body tells you what they're about to do - a little tension in the shoulder, a hip that turns early, breathing that changes right before they explode. The best people in my gym aren't just strong or technical. They're incredible listeners. They feel the question before you've finished asking it, and they already have the answer.

I'm nowhere near that level. On a good day I'm maybe reading one move ahead. But I can feel the game getting bigger the more I learn, which is either very exciting or very humbling depending on how the morning went.

Every now and then I roll with someone much better than me, and for about thirty seconds, just thirty, I'm keeping up. Not winning, not even close. Just in the conversation, moving with them instead of against them, both of us breathing hard and grinning.

Then they choke me.

Best thirty seconds of my week.