The Games You Can Rebuild — and the Ones You Can’t

What poker can teach us about relationships

A man I knew lost his business in his forties — a good business, built over fifteen years, gone in eighteen bad months. He grieved it. Then he started again. Different trade, smaller at first, smarter about debt. By sixty he was standing on solid ground, and he would tell you the failure taught him more than the success ever did. His story is not unusual. It is one of the most ordinary stories in American life: the game was lost, and the game was rebuilt.

Most of life works that way, and it is a mercy. Houses are bought and sold, and a family that loses one roof finds another. Jobs end and other jobs begin. Investments fall, sometimes hard, and a patient person can recover from a bad trade. Even a career — the thing we treat as the spine of a life — can be rebuilt more than once. I have done some rebuilding of my own. The schoolyard had a word for games like these: you played them for fun, and when they ended, every marble went back to its owner. Win or lose, you played again tomorrow.

But not everything in life is a for-fun game, and the wisdom of a family begins with knowing the difference.

A child’s childhood cannot be rebuilt. The years when a son is seven, or a daughter is twelve, arrive once, on schedule, whether you are paying attention or not. A parent who misses them has not lost a marble that can be handed back at the end of the afternoon. Those years are dealt once, like a hand of cards. The grown child carries how it was played for the rest of his life — and hands the style of play down to his own children at his own kitchen table.

A parent’s last years cannot be rebuilt either. There is a season — nobody knows its length in advance — when your mother still knows your name and your father’s stories can still be drawn out of him at the table. People tell themselves there will be another visit, another chance to ask the questions and say the things. Sometimes there is. And then, one ordinary week, there is not, and the un-rebuilt game is finished forever. No court, no fortune, and no amount of regret can reopen it.

And the trust inside a marriage, once it is spent carelessly, does not rebuild the way a bank account does. A couple can forgive — I have seen it — but forgiveness is a slower and more costly construction than the original trust. Some things, once scattered out of the circle, can be gathered only partly.

Poker players learn a version of this. In most games you can reach into your pocket and buy more chips; a lost hand is a lesson, not a funeral. But every so often a hand comes that is not like the others — the one that decides whether you stay at the table at all — and the experienced player recognizes it and slows down. Families run on the same distinction. The skill is not playing every moment as if it were life and death. The skill is knowing which moments are the ones that cannot be replayed, and giving those moments the care the for-keeps players gave their shots: quieter, slower, aimed.

Here is the trouble: most of us allocate our care exactly backward. We agonize over the rebuildable games — the deal, the promotion, the portfolio, the house — and give the un-rebuildable ones whatever attention is left over. The career gets our best hours and our sharpest focus. The childhood, the marriage, and the aging parent get the tired remainder, because some part of us quietly believes those games will wait. They are the only games that will not.

So here is the takeaway, and it is a sorting exercise you can do tonight. Take the things currently consuming your worry and write them in two columns. In the first column, the games you could rebuild if you lost them: the job, the business, the house, the money. In the second, the ones you could not: your children’s remaining childhood, your parents’ remaining years, the trust in your marriage. Then ask which column your time served this week. Most of us do not need a new life. We need to move one hour — one unhurried dinner, one phone call made today instead of someday — from the first column’s service to the second’s. The rebuildable games will survive your absence for an evening. The others are being played right now, whether you are in the circle or not.

What poker can teach us about relationships

A man I knew lost his business in his forties — a good business, built over fifteen years, gone in eighteen bad months. He grieved it. Then he started again. Different trade, smaller at first, smarter about debt. By sixty he was standing on solid ground, and he would tell you the failure taught him more than the success ever did. His story is not unusual. It is one of the most ordinary stories in American life: the game was lost, and the game was rebuilt.

Most of life works that way, and it is a mercy. Houses are bought and sold, and a family that loses one roof finds another. Jobs end and other jobs begin. Investments fall, sometimes hard, and a patient person can recover from a bad trade. Even a career — the thing we treat as the spine of a life — can be rebuilt more than once. I have done some rebuilding of my own. The schoolyard had a word for games like these: you played them for fun, and when they ended, every marble went back to its owner. Win or lose, you played again tomorrow.

But not everything in life is a for-fun game, and the wisdom of a family begins with knowing the difference.

A child’s childhood cannot be rebuilt. The years when a son is seven, or a daughter is twelve, arrive once, on schedule, whether you are paying attention or not. A parent who misses them has not lost a marble that can be handed back at the end of the afternoon. Those years are dealt once, like a hand of cards. The grown child carries how it was played for the rest of his life — and hands the style of play down to his own children at his own kitchen table.

A parent’s last years cannot be rebuilt either. There is a season — nobody knows its length in advance — when your mother still knows your name and your father’s stories can still be drawn out of him at the table. People tell themselves there will be another visit, another chance to ask the questions and say the things. Sometimes there is. And then, one ordinary week, there is not, and the un-rebuilt game is finished forever. No court, no fortune, and no amount of regret can reopen it.

And the trust inside a marriage, once it is spent carelessly, does not rebuild the way a bank account does. A couple can forgive — I have seen it — but forgiveness is a slower and more costly construction than the original trust. Some things, once scattered out of the circle, can be gathered only partly.

Poker players learn a version of this. In most games you can reach into your pocket and buy more chips; a lost hand is a lesson, not a funeral. But every so often a hand comes that is not like the others — the one that decides whether you stay at the table at all — and the experienced player recognizes it and slows down. Families run on the same distinction. The skill is not playing every moment as if it were life and death. The skill is knowing which moments are the ones that cannot be replayed, and giving those moments the care the for-keeps players gave their shots: quieter, slower, aimed.

Here is the trouble: most of us allocate our care exactly backward. We agonize over the rebuildable games — the deal, the promotion, the portfolio, the house — and give the un-rebuildable ones whatever attention is left over. The career gets our best hours and our sharpest focus. The childhood, the marriage, and the aging parent get the tired remainder, because some part of us quietly believes those games will wait. They are the only games that will not.

So here is the takeaway, and it is a sorting exercise you can do tonight. Take the things currently consuming your worry and write them in two columns. In the first column, the games you could rebuild if you lost them: the job, the business, the house, the money. In the second, the ones you could not: your children’s remaining childhood, your parents’ remaining years, the trust in your marriage. Then ask which column your time served this week. Most of us do not need a new life. We need to move one hour — one unhurried dinner, one phone call made today instead of someday — from the first column’s service to the second’s. The rebuildable games will survive your absence for an evening. The others are being played right now, whether you are in the circle or not.

What poker can teach us about relationships

A man I knew lost his business in his forties — a good business, built over fifteen years, gone in eighteen bad months. He grieved it. Then he started again. Different trade, smaller at first, smarter about debt. By sixty he was standing on solid ground, and he would tell you the failure taught him more than the success ever did. His story is not unusual. It is one of the most ordinary stories in American life: the game was lost, and the game was rebuilt.

Most of life works that way, and it is a mercy. Houses are bought and sold, and a family that loses one roof finds another. Jobs end and other jobs begin. Investments fall, sometimes hard, and a patient person can recover from a bad trade. Even a career — the thing we treat as the spine of a life — can be rebuilt more than once. I have done some rebuilding of my own. The schoolyard had a word for games like these: you played them for fun, and when they ended, every marble went back to its owner. Win or lose, you played again tomorrow.

But not everything in life is a for-fun game, and the wisdom of a family begins with knowing the difference.

A child’s childhood cannot be rebuilt. The years when a son is seven, or a daughter is twelve, arrive once, on schedule, whether you are paying attention or not. A parent who misses them has not lost a marble that can be handed back at the end of the afternoon. Those years are dealt once, like a hand of cards. The grown child carries how it was played for the rest of his life — and hands the style of play down to his own children at his own kitchen table.

A parent’s last years cannot be rebuilt either. There is a season — nobody knows its length in advance — when your mother still knows your name and your father’s stories can still be drawn out of him at the table. People tell themselves there will be another visit, another chance to ask the questions and say the things. Sometimes there is. And then, one ordinary week, there is not, and the un-rebuilt game is finished forever. No court, no fortune, and no amount of regret can reopen it.

And the trust inside a marriage, once it is spent carelessly, does not rebuild the way a bank account does. A couple can forgive — I have seen it — but forgiveness is a slower and more costly construction than the original trust. Some things, once scattered out of the circle, can be gathered only partly.

Poker players learn a version of this. In most games you can reach into your pocket and buy more chips; a lost hand is a lesson, not a funeral. But every so often a hand comes that is not like the others — the one that decides whether you stay at the table at all — and the experienced player recognizes it and slows down. Families run on the same distinction. The skill is not playing every moment as if it were life and death. The skill is knowing which moments are the ones that cannot be replayed, and giving those moments the care the for-keeps players gave their shots: quieter, slower, aimed.

Here is the trouble: most of us allocate our care exactly backward. We agonize over the rebuildable games — the deal, the promotion, the portfolio, the house — and give the un-rebuildable ones whatever attention is left over. The career gets our best hours and our sharpest focus. The childhood, the marriage, and the aging parent get the tired remainder, because some part of us quietly believes those games will wait. They are the only games that will not.

So here is the takeaway, and it is a sorting exercise you can do tonight. Take the things currently consuming your worry and write them in two columns. In the first column, the games you could rebuild if you lost them: the job, the business, the house, the money. In the second, the ones you could not: your children’s remaining childhood, your parents’ remaining years, the trust in your marriage. Then ask which column your time served this week. Most of us do not need a new life. We need to move one hour — one unhurried dinner, one phone call made today instead of someday — from the first column’s service to the second’s. The rebuildable games will survive your absence for an evening. The others are being played right now, whether you are in the circle or not.

Share:

More Posts

Send Us A Message

Scroll to Top