Saturday 18 February 2012

Solitaire-y Reaper : Playing the cards well

The game of Solitaire has an amazing charm, or maybe it's just me. I'm not much of a card-game enthusiast, because they often remind me of a lot of complicated things. But Solitaire stands apart from the rest; as a companion and a teacher.

I don't have many games on my laptop, so Solitaire is just about the only game I play. Anybody would say, "damn dude, you got a laptop with all the configurations needed to play a 3-D shooter game like Crysis, Battlefield 3 and the like", but I simply don't have the time to indulge in them. Besides, the addiction to these games is killing......you can never leave the game till after you have spent 5 hrs on it. I have spent 2 hrs at a stretch playing one of these on the PS3, and though it satiates your desire and fantasy of being in possession of an army to command and a weapon to fire, your mind craves for more once the game is over or when you sense you can't afford an hour more (cuz you have spent about 200 bucks). Your fixation for the element of fantasy takes a heavy toll on your mind. I know it because I have experienced it, and it's not good.

So, coming back to Solitaire, this game has some struggles. You can't expect to command an army or fire a weapon, but to sort the cards out properly is quite a task. Most of the times, I am stuck up in the middle of the game without any means to proceed, and I'm forced to quit. And that's the difficult part. You know that this arrangement has a solution, but you're forced to quit because you have exhausted all yours as well as the computer's logic in trying to find a way out.

You badly want to solve the case, but you can't. And then, like a flash of lightning, it strikes you that you can do some tweaking. You might need to pull down a few cards from the deck and then bring down the set of cards that are covering the hidden cards, because most often, the cards that you need in the heat of the moment are the ones that are hidden and covered by a pile of cards that you can't seem to fit in anywhere. A typical roadblock! I badly wanted a Jack of Diamonds, and that smartass was happily nestled among one of the hidden cards, unaware of the struggle that I was going through in order to find him and of the anger that might have caused me to kill him had he been of flesh and blood. What pisses you off even further is the smile on this Jack-ass's face when you reveal him.

Solitaire does test your patience and persistence. There are so many moves and so many permutations and combinations that you need to decide when and where to make a move (not that you are gonna be blown up by a booby trap if you fail to do so). If you play it as seriously as I do, you'd wanna restart that particular game rather than start a new game altogether, because that is what I do. I just know that victory lies ahead, and I'm not gonna leave any stone or card unturned till I see the last four kings happily rested on the deck. You do lose a lot on your statistics, but hey, what matters more is that you finished the job despite the odds! That's what we call attaining inner peace.

The same thing applies to relationships as well. Very often, people involved in one are unable to move ahead (and I'm not talking about the relationship of lovers only), and they are unable to make head or tail of where it's leading them to. Relate this to a game of Solitaire, and you'll understand that sometimes it is required to just sit down, keep a strong head and start making changes here and there to fine-tune the relationship, all the time determined "never to give up"! Your mind has to breathe, otherwise it ceases to think. It is a difficult thing to breathe in times of stress, but if you just breathe, you will understand more, and you won't suffocate others too, especially the ones whom you love and care about. It's just like swimming: if you panic and beat around frantically, you will grow exhausted and ultimately drown. You know it, yet the fear of drowning compels you to drown. In a relationship, fear makes you do what is not apt or just for the moment. It makes you spoil what has taken years of effort to create.

Fear has destroyed many a mind, broken many a bond, cost many their loved ones. The only way to battle it is peace and the will to overcome fear. Big talk from someone like me who has played Solitaire to correlate the facts of life to a mere game, but on a serious note, it does click somewhere, whether in a small way or large.

2 comments:

  1. Nice way to start a topic...describe about Solitaire and then correlate it with relationship and the associated dilemma and entanglement.Dude,flair for language is not lost and totally appreciate your way of writing,..simple yet enticing...keep up the good work and keep writing...

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  2. Chony my boy, kindly change your username. Doesn't suit you anymore. :) Thanks for the compliment bro. You are the first :)

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