Solitaire et life
43/300. Undo?
The solitaire game is one of my favorite digital card games.
You’re given a shuffled deck you didn’t choose.
The cards are already laid out before you touch anything.
Some are face up.
Most are face down.
I like how it has the undo moves. It has a timer too and in simpler terms you have to unstack the cards to stack them from the other of A(ace) to K(king) for the Four different cards and according to colors too. There are also a good number of cards faced down and left for you to unravel what’s underneath them so you can finish up. With each card you move, your number of moves and time counts.
You move what you can.
A red six onto a black seven.
A king into an empty space.
Small, careful decisions. One at a time.
And sometimes, you will reach a dead end and you can decide to move to a new game, restart the old one or undo your previous moves and go again.
And that undo button got me thinking.
Undo doesn’t reset the game.
It doesn’t reshuffle the deck.
It simply takes you back one decision.
You press it when you realize, “Oh. That wasn’t the best move.” or when you reach a dead end.
Half the time, I’d rather undo my previous moves and almost always I suddenly finish the same game that took 6minutes in 2minutes or less.
With undoing the moves, I see that there is a version of that game that could have been done faster and with less moves too.
It’s just like life.
Life doesn’t have an undo button.
You don’t get to reverse conversations.
You don’t get to un-send emotions.
You don’t get to rewind choices made in survival, fear, hope, or ignorance.
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When you move a card in life, it stays moved.
But what if there’s a version of you who pressed undo?
Sometimes I wonder what would have been if I did some things a little differently.
Where would I be if I had chosen to do arts instead of sciences?
What would be if I said some things a little differently?
What height would I have climbed if I studied the medicine and surgery I always wanted?
What would be if I wasn’t born to a Nigerian?
What shape would my life had taken if I had chosen to be a model?
What could have been if I undid some moves and chose another path?
We say there is a version of you out there who is better than you or worse than you and sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten to meet them had I changed something about my life?
A version of me who didn’t stay.
Who spoke up.
Who chose to have the hard conversations over walking out like it’s nothing.
Who chose rest instead of proving something.
Who chose myself earlier.
Who chose safe over peace of mind.
And maybe that’s all life really is.
Not wishing you could change the past but allowing yourself to see it clearly. To see that you didn’t fail but you learned something new.
So when you think about the version of you who might’ve chosen differently,
don’t see them as better. See them as informed by a moment you hadn’t reached yet.
You’re still playing.
The deck isn’t finished.
There are cards you haven’t turned over.
And with or without an undo button, you still get the next move.
