Big Two

January 6, 2010

“Even in some small place we can learn some principle.”

Jessica just said this to me after playing cards together all night.  She is my roommate/co-worker from Taiwan.  Her native language is Mandarin and she came to New Zealand primarily to learn English.  

Tonight she learned the word “opponent” and she did very well incorporating it into her vocabulary immediately.  

“You are my best teacher in New Zealand,” she said to me between plays.  But even while I help her learn English and help her practice, she teaches me too.  

Jessica is only a couple years older than me, but she is very wise.  We’ve been playing a game called Big Two for weeks now and I’m still not very good at it.  Usually she wins or Josh wins.  If I win even one game it’s a big deal.  Tonight she was trying to explain the finer points of strategy to me.  I’ve never been good at strategy in any game.  When I missed the chance to play a good card she gave me a good talking to about it.

She said, “Why didn’t you play this card here?” motioning to an earlier play and my card that would have beat her.  

“I didn’t want to play it in case I needed it later,” I said.

“But you should play it now when you have the chance.  It won’t do you any good later at the end with all the cards in your hand!” she exclaimed.  

“But sometimes I do take the chance and play the card and then later I wish I hadn’t and that I still had it!  I still end up losing,” I whined, resting my head on the table in frustration.

“You play the card and then you go from there!  You take the risk and then figure it out later!  You fall down, you get back up again.  You make the mistake and you learn from it!”

The whole time she was giving me this speech I couldn’t help but think beyond the card game.  I began to think more about life.  “You take the risk and then you go from there.”   I was hearing her but my mind was not on the game.  Even in life you take the risk and go from there.  I’m very good at taking risks from time to time, but like with this card game I think, “what if I hadn’t taken this risk, then I would be there instead of here.”  I often second guess and regret the risks I take.  Instead of learning from it and moving on, I get upset because I feel like I haven’t won.

Sometimes I don’t even get far enough to take the risk and I hold onto my good cards that would win me the game.  I just hold onto those precious cards and believe I’ll be able to use them later.  But what is the point of having a winning card if I never use it to win?  Then I get to the end of the game and I’m still holding onto this card, but it’s meaningless now.  The game is over. Lost.  The card has no value anymore.  Wow, Jessica has a great point.  I don’t want to get to the end of life holding onto my winning cards.  I need to play them while I have the chance even if it means taking a risk and feeling like a loser along the way.  Better to take the risk now and learn from it than never take the risk at all.

We shuffled the cards and dealt them again.  It was my turn first.  “Okay, Jessica, I’m going to be daring,” I said as I pulled out a great play that I normally wouldn’t play early in the game.

“Daring?  What’s daring mean?”

“Daring.  Just like we talked about: taking a risk.”

“Oh like dangerous?”

“Yeah kind of.”

“Oh, okay, daring.”

And we kept playing our cards.  If I can’t start taking risks in a game, when will I start taking risks?  Like Jessica said, “Even in some small place we can learn some principle.”