Life is in a lot of ways just like a poker game. You may be sitting there thinking Bro. Cole what in the world are you talking about? In life we make calculated risks. Everything we do, every decision we make is calculated. We calculate the win/lose possibilities in every decision we make. One decision after another one hand after another and hope they pay out. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Some of the hands that could have won for us we lay down before we ever start. Looking back they were the best hand but for whatever reason we choose not to play them. Maybe the calculations we made said there was to great of a chance for failure. Life just like a poker game is a gamble. We are dealt a hand and we try and try to make the best out of it. When sometimes we know that we are bluffing (lying) to make people think that our lives are so much better than they truly are.
In life the decisions we make as a child for the most part have no big consequences but as we grow older the decisions we make have greater and greater consequences to them. The same is true in poker at the beginning of the game the blinds are low and the risk is small. The consequences for losing are not that big. But as we get farther and farther into the game the blinds go up, the stakes are raised, and the consequences, the risks, are so much greater.
In poker there is a thing called the all-in moment. We hedge everything we have, we put everything on the line for some huge payout. We do the same thing in life if you stop and think about it. Think about marriage for some you bet everything you have on your marriage and you hope and pray that you win. But for others, for over 50% of American marriages people lose. It is nothing more than a coin flip in the world around us. But nevertheless we put everything we have on the line hoping to win.
In poker many times players put up a poker face and say that we have everything together, we bluff. Sometimes we are caught with cards that do not hold up. But other times we bluff our way thru the hand and make ourselves appear stronger knowing that truly we are weak. That is not that much different than the lives we live. We put on a face when we go out in public, we act as if we have everything together even tho we are dying on the inside. Sometimes we get caught and people call us on our bluff but sometimes they don’t.
We play hand to hand. Decision to decision. They pay out they don’t. Many times we go thru life with no plan, with no strategy. We are short sighted and focus in on a singular decision a singular hand. We don’t think about the long game we have before us. We don’t think about the life we have left. We for the most part never think about the consequences of our decisions until they are made.
Mush
Sometimes I find it hard to separate the clutter that goes on inside of my head. It is hard enough to try to stay on task in class or in life in general. But when it comes to writing a blog for me it is pretty hard to stay on topic. It is hard to take the clutter apart in my head and form sentences. It is hard to figure out what exactly I want to say when I want to say it. I love to write blogs about witty things in life. I love to write just about life. I love just sitting down typing what randomly comes into my head and I find during those random sessions the best stuff comes out. Maybe because i unhook the filter I have on my mind and just let everything go and write. But here lately all I seem to have going on is mush. How do I overcome the mush and push past it to the awesomeness I know is there?
2010
Ok something has bugged me ever since New Year’s Eve. I hate the fact that everyone is saying that we a in a new decade because we really are not people. Do the math the first year started Jan. 1st 0001 add ten years to that and the decade closed in 0011. So keep adding the decades and the current decade actually ends in 2011. I just had to set the record straight for everyone who believes we are in a different decade. Not that it really matters but I blame Y2K for the mix up. Everyone assumed that 2001 was a different decade. Also VH1 shares part of the blame with its best of the series…
Behind The Keyhole 