I’ve been playing solitaire quite a bit for several years.

jeani taught me to play spider solitaire. I marveled that she could play 4 suit spider solitaire while dying of cancer (with all the brain fuzziness that entailed). I could only ever play two suit.

I taught doug to play 2 suit spider solitaire about a year ago.

recently he started trying 4 suit spider solitaire, and learned how to do it, and how to win about 1 in 5 games. It’s so hard. I just thought it was practically impossible and never wanted to try. But since I taught him, and then he went beyond me, I felt I had to do it. so he taught me how to do 4 suit. the first time I won I was very excited. I can now win maybe 1 in 10 games (maybe less). I usually don’t try very hard unless I get to a point in the game where I realize it’s winnable, and by then I’m not doing very well.

Anyway, in really difficult solitaire games, like 4 suit spider solitaire, and the more difficult layouts of Freecell, and some regular 3 card draw solitaire games, you find that the way you’ve played it, even though you made moves that seemed to make sense because they moved your further forward than any other moves could at the time, have ultimately made it so you can’t win, and left you stuck. At those points, you are in a bind. You are so far along in the game that you don’t want to go really far back because that would take too much work. so you keep trying to find ways you can win without going too far back. And you go around in circles for a while. But eventually you realize you have to go back and undo the moves a long time ago that made it seem like you made obvious progress and do counter intuitive moves (moves you only could know you need to do from having played it out other ways) and then, having undone your game almost to the beginning, and spent a lot of time and effort, you are able to go forward again and win.

So today I was thinking that life is like that insofar as we get to points where we realize, having gone 20 moves down a certain road, that a long time ago we made choices that seemed to take us farther forward but that now we know actually really screwed our lives up and there is no way to make further progress. Only, the difference is, now that we know the key choice areas where we could go back and change those choices to have a better life (health being the key thing I’m thinking about in my own life) now, we can’t go back and change them! it’s so unfair.