Life Lessons from Spider Solitaire

I'm not a gamer.  My brother is.  He's 10th in the world in something...or other.

The last time I played competitively, it was with my children and it was apes throwing bananas at each other.  I think they exploded and you had to change the angle and velocity of the bananas to hit your opponent.  I figured it was good for their math skills and it didn't hurt for my kids to hurl a few exploding bananas at their mother.  Heaven knows I wanted to throw a few at them.  But I digress.

The one game I DO play in moments of boredom or anxiety is spider solitaire. I'm not very good at it and I don't win very often and I am not competitive enough to really want to win.  But as the game plays out, it teaches me important life lessons, the most important of which is that life doesn't make sense.  It's good to be reminded.

Spider solitaire breaks all the rules of logic that I learned as a child. It is not fair nor is it politically correct.  I have no idea or control of where or why all the fours or sixes or jacks disappear, but somehow, the game must be played out with or without them.

In spider solitaire two wrongs can make a right.  Wow.  That blows my mind. It's so wrong it's painful. Sometimes it's called strategy, sometimes it's called stupidity, and sometimes I get a glimpse of the mind of God as I lay a red five on a black six on purpose to expose a few more cards.  To someone watching the game, they would ask why I didn't put the red five on the red six that is right in front of me, and goodness sake, are you crazy?  I think God gets a lot of that.

I can lose or lose worse. I can win easy or hard.  And still it has little to do with how I played. Sometimes eeking out two completed piles from a deal with no 10s be as satisfying as a win.

The version of spider solitaire I play on my desktop gives options that I may have missed so each hand is a mini game in which I play "Did I miss any options." I can't control the deal, but I can make try to find options to play cards.  It's the one thing I CAN control. That and deciding what to DO with the options...  But even then, I lose.  Often.

Spider solitaire becomes my Serenity Prayer when I get locked in black and white thinking or declare martial law on my world.  Spider solitaire has its own logic and it's not mine.  And that's ok.  I BELIEVE all the cards are there and in FAITH, I play my game.  In GRACE, I win or lose.  But there is one thing that puzzles me still.  Is Undo cheating?