470 words.

Sometimes we are confronted with a choice to make. The options may not have been ones we want to pick on a good day; hell, they may not be ones to pick ever. but we still need to make them. Yes or no, go or stay, call or not.

There’s a parallel universe out there, running on the timeline that had the opposite choice made. We will never know how that manifests, whether it led to a better outcome for us or not.

The only thing to do, ever, is to do the right thing. That’s not an answer that can be immediately arrived at. It’s a process, of looking at the objective and our inner values, and questioning them. Again and again and again and again.

And when the outcome turns out to be something that’s not quite ideal, the questioning starts again.

Where did it go wrong? What could I have done before? What were the signs that we could have caught?

There is no way to control the outcome; that unfortunate fact of life. The only thing to do, is to follow the right process. There will always be times when we question the process itself, because it didn’t lead us to the right outcome. Then again, it could be the luck of the draw itself. The only cards to play are what are in the hand.

When the hand is played, we draw yet another and continue playing the game. It may be boring to reduce life to the problem of ‘playing the hand the best you can’, but there are challenges to deal with in playing a long, infinite game.

The fatigue of playing any game will come, especially when we aren’t winning any round. It’s not fun at all to play games where we lose all the time, and that’s perhaps why players drift to other games. Then ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’ come into effect.

At least they win something.

So the first order of business is to ensure we are not playing a stupid game. How do we tell? The costs and benefits should be easy to see, without needing above a secondary school education on probability. When the prize of the game is something as transient as status or others’ opinion of us, maybe that should spark a thought that it’s a stupid game.

Then again, it’s not easy to see it in the moment, the conclusion that cool-headed analysis brings. Having thought through similar scenarios or dilemmas would certainly help, but how often do we visualise ourselves playing games with crap hands? Only when it happens, then we visualise it as a past case study.

It could be that it was a stupid game in the first place.