Lessons from Solitaire
Since I've been laid off, it's hard to distance myself from my home office: my computer sitting in the center of the house. These days my time spent on said computer usually revolves around job hunting, other research, reading blogs, typing some emails, and every now and then, I just need to do something else. So I've been playing Solitaire.
Yeah. A silly card game on the computer. The one most widely known and the one you could spot on anyone's glasses when you walked up to them in the office and they were 'busy.' I play it now just so I can do something that required some use of my brain that wasn't job-centric. And something that would keep my brain cells firing when at times, they felt like they just wanted to shut down.
The new version that comes with Vista allows you to replay a lost game. At first I found this quite silly. I already lost, why would I want to play it again? Am I a glutton for punishment? Are you trying to rub failure in my face?
Then I thought about it, no doubt as a result of using my brain cells for something somewhat logical in nature. What if I could replay the exact same cards differently? What if the sequence of events led to a completely different outcome? What if that one time, I turned over a different card when I had two choices: would it really change the overall result?
I consider myself a pretty good card player. But could I purposefully miss some moves I knew existed to see if it changed my outcome? I know there are moves that I miss (because I am not perfect), so will it all even out in the end? The moment the cards are dealt; is that when the ultimate end is decided, or are there choices along the way that change it?
I decided to try it. My completely scientific results were this:
- Sometimes, no matter how many times you deal or re-deal the cards, there is no way to change the losing result.
- However, more often than I expected, you could lose one time, but win the next. This usually happened with more than one attempt at the same deck, but the point remains the same: if you try something new, you do have a different outcome.
- And I can only logically conclude that all of the games I did win the first time, I could have just as easily lost as well.
How many cliches have we all heard involving life and a deck of cards? It's a fabulous metaphor to be sure, but I've never really paid much attention to it before I had the chance to see it in this context, in this phase of my life.
I'm going to be a good card player and believe my next play will be getting me to the win. After all, it's not like I can re-deal my own deck until I get there. Or can I?
