Recently, I taken to playing a card game on my computer called spider solitare. It’s yet another way to waste time. It’s a simple game in concept but it can get tricky. I won’t go into the rules. They’re not important for what I have to say.

Every hand dealt in this game is winnable. That’s my theory, at least. I don’t know how true it is, but it seems to me that every hand is winnable. Some hands can be won easily. Others have to be played over and over until you win.

Yesterday, I was playing spider solitaire and I got a particularly hard deal. I played the same hand four times before passing the game on to my husband. He considers himself a spider solitaire expert.

He spent an hour playing the same game again and again. At midnight he finally won the game. “I knew I could do it if I just kept on trying,” he said.

After winning the game he explained his spider solitaire life philosophy to me. I thought I’d pass it on to you.

We’re all given different cards in life. Some people’s hands seem particularly easy to play. Others are more difficult. The important thing to remember is that they’re all winnable. You can’t waste your time looking over someone else’s shoulder at the cards they’ve been dealt feeling jealous or angry about the seeming unfairness in life. You’ll never finish your game if you’re spending all your time doing that. You need to concentrate on playing your game. It may seem hard, but it’s winnable. You just can’t give up.

I don’t know why some people seem to have a harder struggle ahead of them in life than others, but I do know that we are able to come out of the other side of even the most difficult struggles.

Photo by erin MC hammer

This post appears in The Twenty Second Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life.

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