Freecell ---- ---- Beware!

so I wake up in the middle of the night, nothing is happening and yet, I can’t just go back to sleep as if nothing happened when what happened is that I woke up.

now what?

I reach for my android, my phone. I don’t bother to check my Email because I checked my Email just a few hours earlier and there was nothing there then, nothing worth reading, nothing that might keep me engaged long enough to help me undertake the task the confronts me now,

sleep

I need to sleep and yet .... that is when the battle begins.

I say , no, not now. No, I will not open my Freecell. But when i say no, my body/my mind with all its sophistication, all its power to do and not do, is powerless because my attention focused solely on not opening Freecell waned for a split second and in that moment the automatic gesture that I needed the full weight of my willpower to effect, took over and the game commenced, my fingers doing what my brain didn’t command and didn’t want to do.

how is it that I am now fully awake playing Freecell?

In the beginning the moves are relatively automatic. The solution seems so obvious I am exerting no real difference between the moment when my phone was off versus now with Freecell in progress. I am not bored, I feel relaxed, on the verge of possible sleep. Nothing relaxes me more than Freecell, most notably at the beginning, when the game seems to play itself.

My bedroom light is off, the world is so quiet, calm, my brain feels like it is being stroked by the gentle hand of familiarity; me and cards. I have been an active card player since I was six years old. This is my comfort zone

Now I am no longer an observer

I have

traversed the comfortable divide between detached spectator to judge, juror, doer

I have

I have quickly transverse the divide between

i ho that I fail. Failure is the key, the moment when my brain power

I have becomes engaged because I have

this incurable need to compete. I must go on to the finish, to fail or to

victory, most times even that is irrelevant. It is the struggle that counts.

I am sitting up. my entire body in alert posture. the cards flying across the

phone’s face, from one point to another. I am stimulated to the max. Not

what I need when I am trying to go back to sleep, to numb my mind, my

body.

Suddenly, the true pleasure of achievement sets in.. Now there is no hope.

I am into the game, looking at the clock, the score, the moment when the

cards fly into place while I watch and I sit back looking at my total,

judging my score and thinking,(missing the point of the endeavor) next time I will do better. And I do!

and I do

It will be hours before I am tired, before I can turn off my phone,

exhausted, elated, satiated or maybe I will turn off my phone because the

battery will wear down or maybe because sleep waited long enough and nature

sometimes gets its way. linda zises

lin