Dealing With The Hand You're Dealt: Discard And Draw
Never count your money while you're sittin' at the table.
We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.
Handling The Cards You’re Dealt
We’re all dealt a hand we can't initially control. Life is unpredictable that way. In order to live and live properly we must make choices. Life is full of them. While we cannot influence the cards we're first given, we hold the power to shape the hand we play with.
Consider the process of discarding in poker (other games too, they all seem to fit here). You assess the utility of each card towards achieving a desired pattern or combination and decide which to keep and which to let go. This action, this decision to discard and draw anew, reflects a crucial life strategy.
Luckily, we all have access to this functionality. We all possess the ability to choose. Given this, we all employ a strategy here. Think back over the past day, week, month, year, and so on. Keep going back, assessing all the while.
Are you where you wanted to be today? Likely not, I’ll go ahead and answer that one. Life happens, keep going.
What has your strategy been? Is it working in your favor? Has it worked to support the original plan or path you had laid down? Was there a plan?
Where you are now will have been influenced by the hand you were dealt originally. Every one of us, at some point, encounters influences or experiences in childhood that are less than ideal, perhaps even harmful.
Some choose to lean on these experiences as crutches, excuses for why they continue certain behaviors or cannot achieve their goals. But this stance is nothing more than a refusal to play the game wisely. It's an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for the hand one holds.
To illustrate, someone who perpetuates abuse by claiming they were abused themselves is merely opting out of their responsibility to change. They've resigned to keeping the original, harmful cards in their hand, blaming their past for their present actions.
However, acknowledging that a behavior is wrong implies awareness and the capability to choose differently. It reveals an opportunity to discard the detrimental and draw towards improvement.
Life offers a broader pool of options than any card game. The analogy might not be perfect, but the principle stands: we are not bound by the hand dealt by the "dealer"—be it fate, circumstance, or upbringing.
Our power lies in our ability to evaluate, discard, and draw anew. We might blame the dealer for a challenging start, but we must recognize our capacity to change the course of the game.
What not to do is just as crucial, if not more so, than what to do. Abuse should not beget abuse. Being taken advantage of should prompt reflection on vulnerability and inform future safeguards, not encourage perpetuation of the cycle. Every choice we make reshapes our hand, making it distinctly ours and removing the option to fault the dealer for where we stand.
Acknowledging this responsibility is pivotal. Once you've made changes, the hand is entirely different—it's uniquely yours, shaped by your decisions rather than the circumstances of your start.
Achieving a "straight flush" in life might require time and effort, multiple rounds of discarding and drawing, but persistence in this strategy significantly increases the odds of eventually assembling a winning hand.
In essence, life challenges us to play wisely with the hand we're dealt, to strategically discard and draw, aiming for better outcomes. Our choices define our game, our path, and ultimately, our victory.
Don’t be the person at the table playing stud while everyone else is playing draw. Everyone knows who’s actually at fault when the dealer or luck is blamed. It’s whomever is holding the cards. So discard those 2s and 7s and go for the winning hand.
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Wonderful analogy on life’s many choices. Thank you! My sister used this saying to move on with life and responsibility. Just don’t play cards with me because I can make you choose the card of my choice. 😉
The difference between life and a game of cards, is that we don’t typically know the rules when we first start playing. Even the rules we’re taught, depending on our upbringing, may not be the most helpful to play the best game. Throw in the fact that different people think there are different rules, or even different games, and knowing which cards to keep and which to discard then becomes very difficult.
I appreciate that we all have choices, and that we can all choose to act differently than we have acted in the past. I think it is hard to fault people, however, when they have been playing by one set of rules, the ones they were taught, and it gets them into trouble, because everyone else is playing by a different set of rules.