The cards have been dealt

If you can’t change the cards, change the way your play the game.

Life can sometimes get amazingly bizarre. One hasty decision can bring a person at a crossroads and he wonders about the choices he made that actually got him there. Just as one reckless move in the game of chess is enough to completely turn the game. In life as well, one bad choice is enough to take a person in a completely different direction.

So what really is at the core of all this? Do these situations present themselves as opportunities to help us grow? Or are they mere repercussions of our bad decisions? I don’t think I have a definite answer as yet. But I do have a vague idea of how things unfold in the long run.

Sometimes life doesn’t give us a choice. Every choice seems like a burden, and whichever way you decide to go you feel you’d be doomed. So you choose the lesser of the two evils. And once the Rubicon is crossed, you cannot go back. The decision gets imprinted in time and hangs there till eternity. It is very easy to lose hope and feel disillusioned at such times. The difficult thing to do is to hang onto every ounce of hope that your frail being manages to find.

The dead-end could just be a simple detour to a beautiful destination. The entire picture takes time to unfold, just like a painting which seems unappealing in the beginning, but towards the end it turns out to be a definitive masterpiece. 

Life doesn’t come with guarantees or gift cards that you can encash whenever you feel hopeless. But, it does come with a tiny sliver of hope that a tenacious man can change his circumstances to make the best out of his current situation in life. As in a game of Poker, the hand dealt doesn’t really matter. A player can win with the shittiest of cards because he doesn’t rely on the cards in his hands, but on the ability of his mind. He doesn’t play the cards, he plays the person. And that is how he wins the game.

What life throws at you, you can never predict. But what you can do is change the game completely with your tenacity. The purpose is not to walk a path strewn with roses, but to proudly wear the crown of thorns as a badge of honor. After all, the game is never over till the King is in the box!