I like telling jokes. Often a joke starts with a question. Many people try to answer it, as if it were a riddle. However, it’s a joke, not something meant to be solved.
Life seems similar to me in that respect. There are riddles to be solved and jokes/random events to be experienced. I’ll give you an example. I taught my youngest daughter to play backgammon when she was about eighteen. It’s a board game where checkers are moved to home base using dice rolls. Strategy is a big part of the game, but the dice add an element of luck. My daughter would lose almost every time and she was getting frustrated. She finally said, “This keeps happening.”
I smiled and said, “What are you going to do about it?”
She started watching how I played with great intensity. It wasn’t long before she was winning about half the games. She solved the riddle of how to play successful backgammon.
We all know the line, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When similar outcomes keep recurring, I think riddle. Why does this pattern exist? Often the answer is something I need to change within myself.
Once we were playing backgammon, before my daughter learned a winning strategy. She was losing, but then rolled double 6s, three times in a row and won the game. The odds of that happening are 1 in 46,656. It’s possible, but certainly not likely. I didn’t need to develop a strategy to compete with her rolling three double 6s in a row. I laughed it off, like a joke. Just a random occurrence.
Trillions of things happen in the world every day. Often the cause is a recurring pattern, a riddle to be solved. However, statistically random events, jokes, happen also. In the right place at the right time the random event can have huge consequences. Thirty nine thousand people died in Nagasaki Japan when the second atomic bomb was dropped. That happened because the original target that day, Kokura, had cloudy weather and was spared.
It’s a big deal for me to identify important patterns, especially within myself, but I don’t want to waste time looking for patterns within random events. I talked about this in my post Pattern Test.
Knowing if something is a riddle or joke leads me to which question to ask first, why or what. If it’s a riddle I ask why does this keep happening? It’s like the old saying, when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. Is it something within my nature, or the nature of what I’m dealing with? If it’s a joke, I don’t need to correct what is going on, just figure out what to do next.
If I put too much value in things going exactly as I want them to, my life experience becomes fragile. There is little room for error, or minor unexpected factors, jokes, that can derail my quest for getting just what I want. I prefer resilience. It’s so important to me that I devoted three blog posts to it, Rebound, Box Out and SOFO. They are about the importance of resilience, focusing on what I can control, and accepting what IS as the first step to successfully dealing with adversity. It’s easier to be more gentle with myself and life, because my well being isn’t dependent on having things go my way.
Recognizing the difference between riddles and jokes pays big dividends. It brings my stress level way down. I understand I have influence over many things and control over little. I do my best to exert positive influence as I go through my day. By the law of probability, the more I do that, the more positive things will return to me, with the occasional joke popping up. Building in resilience is my shock absorber for those bumps in the road. The biggest part of that is understanding that things don’t have to go my way for me to be happy. I make that decision within myself, not on external events. Nothing more complicated than perception.
May you have enough today, one moment at a time.
THIS HELPED ME 