Solitaire

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 There are zillions of games out there now, ranging from simple to extremely sophisticated. Me? I still like Solitaire. I usually do Free Cell, and sometimes Spider Solitaire. But lately I’ve gone back to the original Solitaire. Plain and simple.

When my son Frankie plays (whatever game it is), he tells me it’s cheating to hit “undo.” I say no way. If it was cheating they wouldn’t give you a button right on the home page.

Of course, I know he is partly right. But I think about it all the time when I’m playing. You have two red queens. Which one do you use? You can’t possibly know the right answer because you don’t know which card is going to be revealed underneath it. I LOVE the undo button. Every time I press it, I think how much better life would be if it also had an undo button.

Sometimes it takes a while to play out. Sometimes you can pick either red queen and you will win the game. Sometimes you have to hit undo and pick the other red queen. And of course after you pick the red queen, there are often a dozen more choices you make, each with its own path.

Sometimes you just plain make a mistake. There is a black four that you just don’t notice. It is an answer that you are missing and it’s staring you in the face. Again, the beauty of undo is that you just press it until you go back to the moment in time when the answer is available to you. You correct your mistake and move on. I love it.

And sometimes, no matter what choice you make, no matter how many hundreds of times you hit undo, you just can’t win the game. It’s just a game that is a loser. You can literally play it perfectly, error-free, and you can’t win. I hate to admit defeat. That is the time you just have to hit new deal and start again. But the beauty in that? Who cares??!! It’s just a game and there is no relevance or consequence whatsoever.

You get the analogies. I don’t need to spell it out. Holy crap. If life were only a tiny bit like that, the world would be a much, much better place to live in. And much, much easier to live in. But we rarely get to undo our choices. And losing the game can have terrible life altering consequences.

Frankie may be “right.” Maybe it is cheating. But I prefer to think of it as using every option possible to win the game. If my real life doesn’t give me those options, I most certainly am going to use them in my escape, entertainment world. And every time I do, I dream about how great it would be if life was that forgiving. If I have to play solitaire, I will take every option possible to make it enjoyable and feel like a winner at the end.

Darcy Thiel, MA, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in NY State. She earned her Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology from Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL. Ms. Thiel has been a couple and family therapist in West Seneca, NY since the mid-1990’s. In addition, she owns a business helping people de-clutter their homes and offices. Ms. Thiel also owns Baby Coop Publishing LLC and is excited to be releasing her first book, Bitter and Sweet, A Family’s Journey with Cancer. Find it here: www.babycooppublishing.com. You can read more about Darcy’s work here: http://www.marriageandfamilycounseling.net.