“If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss”

– an excerpt from the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling

The idea of risking everything on one big gamble sounds  foolish,not manly. At least, that has always been my interpretation of those lines. I’m starting to think that there’s another way to see it.

I don’t like failure. I don’t know if it classifies as a fear, but I sure do avoid trying anything that I’m not reasonably certain to succeed in. It’s partially the legacy of never really being challenged by school as a child. I became used to doing pretty well without putting out much effort. I failed to learn how to try again after doing badly. My preference is to try anything new in a secret and isolated location with no witnesses,  so that I can hide the fact that I am not perfect at everything.

I’ve been more and more able to handle being terrible at something and yet continue to do it: as an example, I will never be a squash pro (curse you, hand-eye coordination) but I keep playing every week. In fact, I’m starting to be aware of how my attitude changes my skill level. If I get worked up at making 1 mistake, others will soon follow. That happened on thursday, and I dug a pretty deep hole for myself in the match. But after going down 2 sets to 0 (3 sets are all you need to win a match), I stopped beating myself up and micromanaging my playing style. Instead, I focused on the number of points I needed to win, and I didn’t worry about what my opponent’s score. By mentally chanting the number, I maintained focus on the game and started to play really well. I kept thinking about the Colorado Avalanche who used the motto “Mission 16W” for their playoff run and Stanley Cup win in 2001. I almost pulled off the comeback win, but we were at the end of our booked time on the court, and the people waiting to play made me nervous and distracted. I hate it when my hang-ups collide.

I’ve found that it’s easier to try new recipes when I cook now, since I’ve re-catagorized those attempts as ‘learning experiments’. If they go badly, oh well. I’ll do it better the next time. I’m also going to work the experiment label into my fiction writing as well. I won’t know what genres I really can’t write in, until I try them out. And every good writer must have a pile of unloved and ugly short stories haunting their office or basement.

So, maybe instead of those poetic lines being literally about risking your money at a game of chance, it’s really about accepting the risk that comes with life. You cannot achieve anything of greatness or lasting value if you confine yourself to comfortable chances.

The strict rules of honor and manliness that tend to make my life more complicated than I like might be entirely the fault of cowboy movies and fantasy books. Be forewarned that I’m writing this right after a rigorous session at the gym, so my energy supplies are bottoming out.  My brain is slowing down word by word. Must hurry!

I have been hung up on the idea of holding your friends to a level of conduct and behavior that I follow myself. If you are judged by the company you keep, then it makes sense to work at helping your friends be less awful. But I am not their parents. I’m not in charge of giving them advice and guiding them through their own stupidity. I don’t even have to categorize some of them as friends. Just because I socialize with a dude and sometimes hang out at his house while doing so, I am not legally obligated to bump his rank up to ‘friend’.

And what a piece of work this particular idiot is. I won’t catalogue the armada of poor, selfish decisions he makes, but trust me when I say that he is a mess. I felt bad leaving him in his own catastrophes, because he has kids and Max enjoys playing with said kids. But I have to remember how resilient the human race is, and how kids have been thriving and excelling far past the hurdles their dumb parents have put in their way since the end of time.

Old movies taught me that you have to respect a man when you’re in his home, but they also taught me that smoking and drinking shots of cheap Hooch are manly as well, so it’s time to rethink their influence on me. Respect doesn’t have to mean you support a guy’s terrible choices or lead them to a more righteous life. In most cases, it means you try to avoid calling him a dullard to his face, and don’t steal anything while you’re there.

I am on very few mailing lists, mostly due to my reluctance to participate in things with people. Somehow, I’m on a folk music list. I think I was harvested from a group email to the members of PWAC (Professional Writers Association of Canada) so I get the occasional heads up about an upcoming evening of boring, sleepy and long-winded music. Huzzah.

I’m also on a theatre-related list, from my previous involvement with the Grand theatre’s Playwright’s cabaret. It’s a little irritating now, since I haven’t made it into the last two Cabarets, but that’s my own fault for submitting really slapdash work. I wanted to find the quality threshold for the contest (it seems) and I found it. My heart wasn’t in it so I did a half-assed job and that is a generous assessment of the amount of effort I put in. That should limit the shame of failure but strangely enough it did not. But I digress.

The most recent list email I received has the dubious distinction of being the worst commercial email I’ve ever received. It wasn’t to the level of gibberish spam email touting penis pills and cheap watches, but it wasn’t pretty.

I shouldn’t make too much of a big deal about this, I guess. They only mis-spelled 1 word. Unfortunately, it was one of the words in their company name. And the incorrect spelling was in 4 different locations in the email, including the ‘from’ field.  Oh, for the love of a good editor. I don’t think I’ll be attending their event.