playing solitaire

Playing Solitaire

A lot of people are familiar with the game of solitaire. There are those who play the game for lack of more productive things to do, while others think it’s a welcome and well deserved retreat from their usual humdrum schedule. If you’re one of those who play solitaire for lack of better things to do, you must have found yourselves getting frustrated over not completing a game in a series of ten. (Especially when you lay a wager, that if you complete this particular game, yes, you will get the promotion you’ve been waiting for, or Ana will finally agree to go out with you…things like that…come on, don’t deny it…) The computer version is more, shall we say, bamboozle-proof, that is, when there are no remaining legal moves, the game is really over (but you can always start a new game). Unlike when you play it using the playing cards, you are often tempted to modify rules to your advantage, e.g. shuffling the remaining cards, suddenly drawing one card at a time when you started with three…so, who’d say I’m not guilty? Hmmm, okay there’s no need to say I’m sorry and that it was a lapse of judgment on your part, there’s nothing far-reaching in doing this little trick to complete a silly game anyway…But then, you do realize, that it is indeed, just a game.

However, some people do treat life as game. What do we know, perhaps, life is an all-important game of solitaire. If you try and see your life the way you engage in this game, a few significant realizations inevitably strikes you. First, you start the game by laying down your cards with the object of using all the cards in the deck to build up the four suit stacks in ascending order. Then you consider all available plays and turn over cards from the deck when you have exhausted all available moves. As you go about building row stacks and suit stacks, you are faced with different choices. You sometimes encounter a fix where in you have to choose which of the two stacks you should move to an empty space. Disappointment steps in when your choice turns out to arrest the all-important card that will let you complete the game. The same goes true for a lot of choices you have to make in your life. You have chosen to simply go with the flow for the longest time, but once the unavoidable knocks, you have to make a choice and be grown-up enough to live with this choice and the consequences that will ensue, because it is not always that you’re given the luxury of undo.

On an even more earnest note, you’d probably appreciate that so much about a person’s character can even be revealed with the way he or she plays his solitaire. It is not to presume one person as an inexorable loner, simply because he or she is so hooked on solitaire. By character, we’re talking of something else deeper—that thing called integrity, which is aptly put to a test even through a seemingly trivial thing as playing this game. Integrity, they say, is doing what is right even with nobody looking—something we all need to get reacquainted and identified with and once again be completely assimilated to.

In the end, whether the cards animatedly jump on your screen is a matter of how you play your cards. For some, it would not even be an issue of winning the game but trying to come out as better individuals, with an improved sense of value, every game of solitaire they play.