Life is like a Game of Cards

 It is difficult to understand life. People study scriptures, sciences, arts and philosophies to understand life but they rarely succeed. When they succeed in achieving their objectives in life, they gain confidence that they have understood life. Yet they lose all the confidence as soon as they encounter defeat and find that their understanding of life was totally wrong, and their confidence was quite misplaced.

Let us try to understand this mystery of life with a few examples. One of the most important learning from all scriptures and sciences is the law of cause and effect or Karma, which means that everyone has to reap what he has sown. Therefore, a person doing good karma must be rewarded and a person doing evil karma must be punished. Yet we find people leading happy and successful life even after doing many evil deeds, while there are many people who, despite doing all good deeds, lead a life of pain and misery.

Some of us believe that God is all powerful and one can get what we desire by praying to God. Yet there are millions of believers who lead a miserable life despite praying to God everyday. There are also millions of people who lead a happy life despite ignoring and even condemning God. Every believer, therefore, often wonders, if there is any benefit at all in payers, and often doubts the existence of God itself?  People often follow a life of honesty and integrity as they believe that honesty is the best policy. Yet they get frustrated when they see a large number of dishonest people succeeding in life.

The Game of Cards

You might have played the game of cards sometime in your life. The mystery of life seems to closely resemble the game of cards. There is no way one can be absolutely sure about his victory in the game of cards. Even if a person has just learned to play the game and he is pitted against an expert of the game, he can still defeat the expert, if he gets the best cards.  Experts have given it a name also—‘The beginner’s luck’.

In life, like a game of cards, the winning or losing depends on luck as well as skill. It is not a game of ‘pure luck’ or ‘randomness’, but also a game of intelligence, techniques and skill developed with practice and experience.

If a person pays close attention to all the matches he has won or lost, he starts noticing the trends and hidden knowledge in the game of cards. For example, he closely monitors the cards played by other players and understands from his calculations what is otherwise unknown—‘which cards have been exhausted by the opponents’ or ‘which cards are with which player’?  He can guess the cards of the opponents from the moves made by them, from their facial expressions and the body-language.

Imagine somehow you can know all the cards of all your competitors by some supernatural power—you have hardly any chance to lose.  It is for this reason that people try to peep into the cards of others which can give them fair idea of the strength of the opponents and help them devise their strategy. Since everyone tries to conceal his cards keeping them close to their chests, an intelligent player tries to get such inputs of information from logic, reasoning and intuition.

The Art of Card Playing

When each player knows the cards of others, nobody is in a position of advantage, and the game of cards loses its charm, as then it becomes a game of mind like the game of chess. The challenge is to know the cards of others without letting them know your cards.

In real life, everyone tries to keep his cards a secret and you have to only make a guess of how the other person is going to move. In this venture, logic and reasoning help only a bit and there are a large number of possible cards that your opponents may have, which can be played in thousands of ways.

Therefore, you have to also understand the mind of your opponents to predict their moves and thus plan your moves accordingly. Good players try to learn the thoughts of opponents through their facial expressions and their past records. Yet, when you are playing with experts, everyone is trying to do the same. Hence you have to often conceal your thoughts by hiding your expressions or even by giving a false expression to mislead your opponents.

Thus winning a game of cards is not purely a matter of luck. It is also not pure science based on logic and reasoning. It is a mix of chance, skill and knowledge. It is an art as we must understand the mind of others from our own mind. A good card player must have a logical and reasoning mind with strong intuition to know the thoughts of others. It is by these skills that he can win even in an adverse situation or at least minimize his loss in the event of defeat.

Winning the Game of Life

No player of cards can ensure wining all games, as there is always a factor of luck and randomness in getting the cards. No person can ensure his victory in life purely by intelligence or intuition. Every person must, therefore, be prepared to lose some games in life. Yet one must never forget to learn the lessons from his defeat.  If one learns all the lessons and he pays due attention during the game, he improves his chances of winning in the game as well as in his life. As such, at the end of life, we come victorious even after suffering many defeats as our gains are more than our losses.

This article is from my book "From Knowledge to Wisdom".
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