“The average American spends more time planning their summer vacation than their life.”

I have heard this phrase and realize that we are not average. Britton and I spend a lot of time thinking about our lives, our future, our goals and what it means to be alive. Life is weird. We do weird things as human beings in this time and space. When we step outside of our daily lives and contemplate our existence it seems to come down to a game of poker. We get certain cards dealt to us (like where we were born, what we look like, the amount of money our family has) and we have certain ways to play those cards. It’s all about comparison because compared to someone who was dealt a crappy hand, we have it made but compared to someone with a royal flush we have little. Usually most people are somewhere in between. I think we have pretty decent cards and we’ve been playing them fairly well. In poker you usually don’t win with the first hand, it’s about how you play the game over time. Life’s both a game of chance (destiny) and skill (free will). In fact, the modern deck of cards is based on Tarot Cards that are used in fortune telling.

We’ve also compared life to Monopoly. It’s a long game and the first part of the game is about setting yourself up for the end of the game -we’d be the Schnoodle dog piece :-). That’s where we’re at. We’re trying to make good investments, keep good jobs and play the game right so that we can do what we want later in the game. In our particular life game, we want to live in Puerto Rico. We would like to have some Colorado income either from a work-from-home job or from some of the investments we’ve made and some Puerto Rican income maybe in the form of a guesthouse. Money in our modern world is so abstract, but is a way to calculate how you’ve been playing the game.

It is so tempting to jump ahead of yourself in these games, but usually to “win” you have to have self-restraint, like Kenny Rogers says, “Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em”. We like our life here in Colorado and we are looking forward to moving to Puerto Rico. Knowing when and how is the hard part. Ever since the Lares deal fell through I have felt like we were even more in Limbo. At least with Lares we knew we had a marker set on that spot, now? It is all ephemeral. To plan out your life farther than a few days is like trying to predict the weather. You might have some idea based on the seasons and what has happened years past, but then again, you can have the coldest June 2nd in history (like we did yesterday). We would like to get everything settled and decided within a year to two years. But it’s hard to say where life, like a current, will take you. Our vision of a winning end game would be to be happy. My working definition of happiness is to have something to do (a daily goal), someone to love and something to look forward to. I have that now and I will work hard to keep that going in the end game. I would prefer to have something to do that I choose to do rather than the traditional office job of little freedom. Golden handcuffs , routine and comfort are hard to break away from- they are the blue pills (Matrix reference). But we are preparing ourselves and trying to live an “examined life” as Aristotle says not just an “average” life.  

Even if we play the game of life carefully and examine it from every side, I’d say we’re still “all in” for the ride.