"I have to say that I got off very easy. There were incidents"

A voice of measured restraint speaks from those two sentences. The first acknowledges fortune while the second refuses to sanitize the past. “I got off very easy” places the emphasis on perspective; it frames personal experience not as the worst of what could happen, but as comparatively mild within a larger field of hardship. The phrase carries humility and a sense of proportion. It resists the pull toward self-dramatization, softening the ego and centering the broader reality that others have faced far more.

“There were incidents” opens a window to what is not being fully narrated. The noun is deliberately small, even bureaucratic, signaling moments that were sharp enough to matter but not so catastrophic as to consume the story. That understatement does two things at once: it acknowledges harm and sets a boundary around it. It’s a rhetorical calibration, honesty without spectacle, an invitation to recognize patterns without forcing the listener into a posture of shock.

Coming from a pioneering figure in a traditionally insular domain, the two lines also read as a commentary on meritocracy’s contradictions. A champion can affirm the gifts of opportunity and skill while recognizing frictions that accompany being first, or being visibly different, in spaces that presume neutrality. The balance here is ethically significant: gratitude without denial, realism without grievance.

The cadence hints at chess itself. A player might describe a difficult position survived by luck and resourcefulness, “got off easy”, while conceding tactical skirmishes, “incidents”, that could have turned the game. Transposed to life, that metaphor captures contingency: talent matters, but so do breaks, biases, and moments that could have gone another way.

Ultimately, the sentiment models a generous memory. It refuses to erase the scratches on the surface while declining to make them the whole portrait. Such restraint can be a quiet form of solidarity: a way of saying, I came through; not all did; let’s keep our eyes open.