Posted on 2024-07-09 Game teaches life lessons Reported in The Times Dispatch on July 15, 2015 in a column titled, Times Dispatch wins awards. Vivian Heyl won a first place in the (Arkansas Press Awards) General Interest Column category. Vivian’s winning column was titled “Game teaches life lessons.” Judges commented, “Great analogy. Fantastic storyteller.” --- Game teaches life lessons By Vivian Heyl I enjoy playing solitaire. It’s a complex game that has taught me a great deal about life. There’s something about moving those 52 cards round till they finally become a neatly organized stack that makes me happy. I remember playing with cards when I was very young. Sitting at the kitchen table I would take the deck of jumbled cards and begin to rearrange them. I was rescuing them from chaos and I felt sure that once I could get them all back to their own families they would be happy. At that early age I was completely convinced that the heart, diamond, club and spade families should all be together and it was my responsibility to help them. As I grew older my parents began to teach me about the cards. The idea of a hierarchy was baffling at first, but I soon began to get the idea. I thought the kings, queens and jacks looked pretty spiffy but the aces weren’t too shabby either. I also learned cards have some pretty weird names. For instance a two is called a deuce, and a three is a trey and sometimes the five is also a fiver. There are one-eyed jacks and kings and painted ladies and a special card known as the joker. The joker is the odd man out in the deck. Disdained by many and coveted by some, the joker plays a complex role in the world of cards. I was probably six before I began playing solitaire with any real understanding of how it all worked. I learned that I couldn’t just rearrange the cards however I saw fit. There were rules that had to be followed and even though I thought some of them were pretty iffy, I did my best. My favorite game is sometimes called patience, but it is most commonly known as Russian solitaire. It is a game that is played by placing the cards by suit in downward columns from the king to the ace. The object, however, is to stack them on the pile from the ace to the king. There’s that hierarchy thing again. There is still a sense of achievement all these years later when the cards all line up by family. Though it isn’t much to crow about it improves my mood each time it happens. I said earlier that solitaire taught me a great deal about life. There is something about this game that clears my mind and helps me to think about my choices, what I should do to solve a problem or organize my day. Solitaire represents a lot of life’s experiences or at least that’s the way I see it. When the cards are first dealt they are willie-nillie, all over the place. When I was much younger I often indulged in a flurry of card moving, quickly rearranging them from one pile to another in an attempt to bring order to the deck. This often resulted in an abrupt end to the game. The truth is making decisions without thought usually leads to a dead end. Unless you are willing to cheat, no more moves means the game is over. By the time I had reached my teens I’d decided to actually put some thought into the moves. I looked at where the move would take me and what options it opened up. I eventually learned to play the game forward in my mind weighing one option against another. Then I would decide which moves would result in the most chances for success. Even when I carefully planned my moves it didn’t mean I would win. Sometimes the dead end is there even though it isn’t visible yet. When there was nowhere else to go I had to start over once again. Somewhere in there I began to learn what the game teaches. It teaches patience, that not every choice will be the right choice and it’s okay to reshuffle and start again. I have won a few hands of solitaire in my life, but I have lost a whole lot more. Though I loved winning I found out the losses were more frequent. Playing solitaire taught me that in every loss there are some lucky moves and that every win takes more than a little bit of luck. --- Originally published in The Times Dispatch on April 9, 2014.