I wanted to share something with you that happened to me yesterday,
Which blew my mind with insight.
And I know even as I'm going to try to explain this to you,
I'm going to fail miserably,
To put this in words.
But I was engaging in my evening ritual of playing the card game shithead with Dewi.
And to explain this without going into details about how this game works,
We were at the very end,
Or let's say we were close to the end,
And I was winning.
Then as we got closer to the end,
Like towards the very end,
It looked like I was losing.
And I couldn't believe it.
Like,
How is this possible?
How did this just happen?
And then we got down to the last couple of plays,
And I saw my cards and she saw her cards,
And it was just obvious,
I'm not going to win.
And so I didn't even finish.
I mean,
We do this sometimes,
Right?
Like if it's obvious,
Like rather than take going through the motions,
It's like,
Okay,
You won,
Carry on,
Next round.
And so I had essentially given up.
And then in this game,
You have three cards that are facedown that you don't see,
Which are your last cards,
Yada yada.
And as I was flipping them over to put them back in the pile,
Dewi's looking at them.
She said,
Oh my God.
And I didn't even notice,
But I had the exact perfect cards to ultimately beat her.
Right?
Like the exact ultimate cards,
The only cards that could have beat her.
And they were all facedown,
Three cards facedown,
Done,
Done,
Done.
And I would have won.
And the reason it blew my mind for many reasons,
But the game wasn't over.
And I was convinced I lost.
It looked that from every perspective,
I lost.
So I gave up.
And I wonder how many times that happens,
Where we assume not realizing life has given you the perfect cards,
And you don't even get the chance to find out.
Or you find out after you gave up.
And the comedy of this again,
Is it was just a game.
It doesn't matter.
Please see this.
This is the important part,
Right?
It's not that I actually lost something.
That's imaginary.
And it's the same in life.
We don't actually gain anything.
We don't actually lose anything.
But the point is to remember how often we fool ourselves into thinking we know.
And of course,
It makes me wonder in so many other areas of my life,
Where I feel like I'm on the edge of giving up.
Oh,
It totally looks like I failed.
Did you?
Did you finish?
And you see,
If we look at this pain that we might have,
Do you see it's based on a perspective that you failed?
That something's over?
That it's not actually over?
And even if it looks like it's over,
Is it really over?
It was such a wild moment for me.
I think I had a good 30 second pause.
A good 30 second,
Holy shit pause.
What just happened?
What happened was I thought something was happening that didn't happen.
That wasn't happening at all.
And I was so convinced that I was slightly irritated.
Irritated that I just wanted to give up.
And life was smiling the whole time.
