Solitaire

Have you ever played Solitaire? Not Spider Solitaire; nothing against it, but I mean the original Solitaire. If not, go play. This blog will be right here when you get back.

See? All set. Now you'll have a better grip on what I'm saying.

I love Solitaire. It's a great game. It's not necessarily easy, but it's not difficult either. It can also be a game you either play absentmindedly (though you'll certainly miss things) or with a lot of focus. It passes time if you're bored, and there's a great feeling of success when you win.

But that's what I love about Solitaire: you rarely win. Of all the times I've played, I've won maybe 60%-70% of the time. Or at least I think I have. That's one value of Solitaire: you don't really lose until you give up looking for more moves. You could potentially play on the computer and just hit "M" until there's no more options, but that's no fun- not for me, anyways. Without doing that, you just look at the cards, and if you can't find anything, you lose. The potential exists that you actually did lose- Solitaire isn't a game you're guaranteed to win; it can be that from the initial deal there actually is no way to win at all. But you don't realize that, and you won't until you give up, or you decide that it's probably a lost game.

And as for how long it takes you to be convinced of that? It's up to you and your personal determination. I've sat with one game of Solitaire for almost a full hour looking at how I could keep going with it (the beginning of the game was smooth and things were falling into place, until they didn't. But I wanted to finish the game). In that case, I was able to re-arrange things enough to find a way to win. I've also sat there for half an hour, or forty-five minutes, and other spans of time looking for a way to beat a game that in the end I conceded to. On the other end of the spectrum, after I've played a few games in a row and can't find a move, I've given up in approximately five seconds. But you decide the length of the game, and when you've lost.

It's these points that made me think about Solitaire in a way that holds lessons for life. When playing with a deck of cards or without the "M" function, you NEVER know if you've ACTUALLY lost a game of Solitaire. You decide when you do- and that's limited by your own perspective completely. I guarantee some of you readers could have come by and taken a game I've given up on farther than I did. And that has value: it teaches you- literally- when to fold and walk away. It tests your determination, but for the sake of time and a potential better game (or opportunity) in the future, also when to move on. Not only that, but I think Solitaire is a good representation of life itself. Nothing is certain in Solitaire- you won't always succeed, you won't know if you could have done better. Nothing is certain in life in these same ways. In life, you won't know if you could've handled a situation better, because you can't go back and try again. You can reflect, things can come up in your mind later, but by then it's already been done. And by no means can that scare us away from playing.

Perhaps the most important thing about Solitaire is precisely that, is that it forces you to decide. Even with the knowledge you might have a 0% chance of winning, or you might fail along the way, if you play the game, you're forced to move on and play on. You're forced to move the cards and play with some confidence in the idea that the moves you are making are the moves that lie on the path leading you to success. Even more permanent, and therefore requiring more self-assurance and commitment: you're forced to decide when you've lost. And that takes a lot from the mind. When you make a mistake, you'll learn from it in your next game, but you have to now deal with the decision you made, and now make more to try to fix what you did wrong.

Although, I suppose you could just not play Solitaire; you could just walk away from the game and throw it away. But what if you just don't play in life?