You can only play the cards you have

The things that I watch

I am a fan of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that anytime I light up my Amazon Fire Stick 4K*, I log on to YouTube and catch the most recent episodes that were recorded within the last 24 hours. The kind of insight and commentary he brings to the issues of the day usually has me applauding from my sofa in awe.

One section of his monologues that intrigues me is the lead-in to his Meanwhile polemics, it is made up of two counterintuitive deliveries almost nonsensical yet quite studied, I have myself wishing I could write like that. Then again, talk shows have writers, so these are more a confluence of crazy ideas than the individual genius of one, though the innovation itself might just be that of one person. What do I know?

The cards you’re dealt

Anyway, in another segment that gets played every few weeks, a guest is invited to participate in the Stephen Colbert Questionert, a series of 15 questions that presume to give a better knowledge of the person being interviewed. On this occasion, it was James Taylor who for the last question, Describe the rest of your life in five words, answered, “Play the cards I’m dealt.”

Now, I am not a card player, I only barely know anything about hands in poker even as I have if I remember correctly written code to randomly deal cards to present a winning poker hand, 2-Pair, Royal Flush, 4 of a kind, that sort of thing. I doubt I would ever have the proficiency to play cards for money and not that I would countenance that level of folly.

Any fool’s poker

However, I understand a few principles around the game, when cards are dealt, you cannot choose what you get, that’s just luck or fate, depending on how you view things. When the betting starts, reviewers might suggest the hand you have has more chance of winning the pot than the other person. Then other cards are put on the table, so that between the 3 you have in your hand and the 2 that end up on the table, you come to a decision, on who has the better hand.

Forgive my amateurish descriptions. Sometimes, you’ll fold because you do not think you have a chance, maybe you can raise the ante because you are surer about what you have got, then, there is a bluffing where you suggest you have the best hand and dare the other person to call your bluff, beyond the basic skill, it becomes a game of wits. Someone with the right kind of resolve can win over a good hand and this happens.

Fundamentally, whichever way the game goes, you can only play what you have got, never what you wish you had. Then even if you had everything in line but your bluff was not up to standard, the game might end early without you getting others to commit more to the pot for a bigger win. Let me exit the stage left at this point.

You can only play what you have

In life, we analogously in a card game where by fortitude, destiny, luck, fate, or blessing, we are dealt an experience of life that we have to live to the best of the capabilities and possibilities we possess. Nothing is perfect and even the perfect goes awry. We are left with having to live life as we find it and make the best of it to the squander or the prosper, then it could just be average and that in itself may not essentially be bad, just do your bit.

We can daydream and wish we were living another life, get into a transponder and be translated into that alternate universe where all those dreams are living realities in the midst of the same faces and issues of life. A good hand in a bad setting of a paltry pot for the winnings. You begin to realise the futility of it all, for no matter the number of infinite universes we might visit, the same human issues will exist. We might as well stick with the universe we know rather than the one we are introduced to as newly arrived foreigners in a strange land.

This is not against the march of progress, we can do a lot with what we have, we can have dreams, live with hope and march towards the realisation with purpose and determination. We can only do that with what we have rather than what we wish for. And so, I could well understand what James Taylor meant by “Play the cards I’m dealt.”, for life whichever way you live it or refuse to live it would always be, what you make it. And from the music, according to Leon Patillo, ‘all of your dreams can come true.’

Blog - The bird in hand is all you have

* All my media content is now delivered through this device to my Smart TV, I switched off my TiVo device over 2 months ago because it was just consuming electricity, the device allows me to download all the apps I need to watch everything I am interested in.

Making possible out of apparent impossibility

When the minor is major

There are times when I think I am going to do something rather impulsive triggered by a stroke of luck or good fortune, I am primed and ready in mind and thought as if to act and pounce upon the opportunity when it arises. That part is somewhat set up even if the practicalities of it have not yet been fully considered, I have the confidence that is a mere formality.

Then, there is a passage of time and fortuitously as the apparently mundane in life is happening, there is a confluence of events not exactly as the hope for that type of luck desired, yet it is a build-up quite unexpected but just as significant. A landmark is reached that makes you realise you have been sitting quite unbeknownst on a blessing, your unawareness is gifted by the fact that it is not so obvious or sudden, like miraculous or lucky.

Count the blessings, always

This is where we risk the mundane leading us into moot ingratitude and the apparently normal makes us seem unthankful and by that unreflective of how so wonderfully blessed, privileged and successful we are. Rash as one can be in decision-making, then determined as one can be in purpose, all things and I mean all things do work together for the good.

I am thankful that goodness, mercy, favour, and more surround me, that I am given more than enough sometimes as of right, as of requirement, as of worth, or as of just the way things work out, all of which one should not be ashamed to live in the reality of, then never forgetting to show that what has become possible to one should not be an impossibility to others who can just dare to dream it.

Thought Picnic: Avoiding creepy headlines of misfortune

Creepy headlines

I cannot help but notice a kind of headline that appears after news stories culled from the web as related material, interesting topics, or as a result of dastardly algorithms.

The one that got me writing this blog along with others similar in nature was:

Where [Famous footballer] Lives At [Age] Will Make You Especially Sad.

Add to that others like:

What [Celebrity] looks like today will amaze you.

Remember [Celebrity Picture]? Take A Deep Breath Before You See What They Look Like Now.

What [Celebrity] is worth today shocked his family.

[Celebrity] who starred in [Film, Drama, SitCom], now works an everyday job.

Now, none of these headlines or the stories behind them interest me, but the topics cannot be ignored because someone is making money on the backs of the possible misfortunes of others. I say this because these links are almost always sponsored by third-party outfits unconnected to the original news site.

Purveyors of misfortune

For one reason or the other, this type of news sells, it almost reads like a kind of inverted snootiness where the reader is invited to revel in the misfortune of another in some sort of disconnected Schadenfreude, a glee that derives from comparing one's lack of luck to the failing luck of another to give you a good feeling in your bad place.

I cannot fully appreciate why this kind of unnecessarily vile gossip masquerading as news and offered as kind of moral tale of the ephemeral nature of wealth, health and fame is one that attracts so much attention, for there is no particularly good intention for publishing this stuff apart from its easy appeal to the innate busybody complex we all possess to varying degrees, yet, exercise some restraint to refusing to allow this tendency to define us.

Celebrate better things

Naturally, I am all for celebrating the rise and success of good people and much as some might fall on hard times, I take no pleasure in poking fun at them. In the cases where the situation or circumstance was completely out of their control, I would hope to commiserate and where I can help, I will.

We also have a tendency to stupidity and foolishness, we find ourselves doing incomprehensibly absurd, reprehensible, criminal, or idiotic stuff. In those things the greater battle is in getting to the point of accepting our prime responsibility for the situation and then moving on to forgiving ourselves, whilst opening the scope for recovery, recuperation and restoration.

There is enough suffering in the world for each episode of the life of an individual, my hope is that we all find more pleasure in celebrating the successes, the triumphs, the victories, the recoveries and the wonderful stories of those near and far, whilst resisting the urge to click of those sponsored links to misfortune, as it diminishes us as much as the subject has been diminished too.