The Gambler

It's been awhile since I posted on my blog, due to some major life shifts I needed to embark on that have taken up a lot of my emotional energy. It's been great, from the point of view of having first hand emotional experiences to use in my future writing, and rough in all other ways.

I had an excellent session tonight with my favorite Jungian analyst. He got me to realize that the bleak future I'd been envisioning for myself going forward may play out an entirely different way. In fact, I think he used those exact words. Something in that got me to thinking, and of course, that's always a dangerous thing!

My thoughts took me to the idea of poker, of life being more or less a gamble. As of late, I've been challenged by the idea that people think I'm bluffing when I'm not. With the idea of things playing out, gambling and the idea of a bluff, I came to the point of remembering Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler."

That song came out when I was around 12 years old. It's an easy enough song to memorize, and so at the time, being 12 and having little else to do with my time, I did. It was something more than a song for me, because unlike most 12 year olds, I was in the unique position of having been taught to play poker at the age of 5. My mother had wanted me to be a casino dealer, her great aspiration for me. When you learn to play poker before you enter school, it really does something to your mindset. I learned to calculate the odds of things, understand the idea of risk, and firmly understood the game.

I know how to bluff, and I know what to gamble. I even know how to set a deck up in my favor. These skills developed at such an early age no doubt account for my success in life. I never did become a casino dealer, nor had any desire to be one, but I took something more from the lesson and applied it to my life.

Insofar as it applies to the song, the parts that resonate most for me are this:

"If you're going to play the game, boy, you've got to learn to play it right...

...Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away, and knowing what to keep, because every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

It's really about knowing what to expect from the game, and understanding (as a metaphor for life) that it's not about the cards you're dealt, it's about how you play them that makes a difference. Any and every hand we are dealt can be a winner or a loser, depending upon what we make of it. It's not one of those glass half empty or half full metaphors that speak only to perspective. It's more about how a person decides to use what they've got in front of them, and making the best of it.

That really helped a lot. I've been dealt a hand I didn't expect, knew what to let go of, but until tonight, I hadn't realized there are some keeper cards in my hand, that will serve me well in how things play out in the future.

It's nice to be thinking this way, at least for tonight!