I have absolutely no idea why on earth we decided it would be fun do this to ourselves — winding the clock back a bit with a game of drinking roulette. It definitely made for a rather refreshing twist to the Friday afternoon book club some of my girlfriends and I tried to get up and running (I know hey, which book club meets on a Friday?).

So anyway, that was probably the last time I’m ever participating in a game of drinking roulette, which simply entails waiting for some sort of trigger which you have no control over and then taking that trigger as your cue to take a shot. In addition to the game itself being a really bad idea in concept, the chosen shots-drinking trigger was even worse — the sound of a specific dog barking in the neighbourhood, which had a very distinctive and funny bark. I guess the postman must have come around or something because things got out of hand very quickly as the dog barked continuously for about 10 minutes straight.

Bar for one of the ladies, we’ve all been a group of very good friends since our varsity days, so we could all agree on the fact that we just aren’t cut out for this sort of thing anymore — something which we could do with consummate ease back in those days.

Lesson Learned

Apart from the fact that your body just can’t handle what it could a mere 10 years ago, I learned a good lesson from our little game of drinking roulette. Yes, I may be trying by all means to console myself after clearly making a bad decision, but the lesson really hit home and hit home hard.

It simply has to do with risk taking and risk management, I guess. Life presents us with so many junctures at which we are called upon to make decisions. In fact, one could argue that the very essence of our existence is merely a series of decisions we’re called upon to make. You can choose to stay in bed for an extra 15 minutes in the morning, after your alarm has rung, or you can jump out of bed and the difference between those two options could have a major impact on how the rest of your day is going to play out, and perhaps even the rest of your week.

So the lesson learned is that some risks are just not worth taking, quite simply because one has too much to lose in taking those risks and not all that much to gain if the best was to come out of taking those risks. Risks worth taking are those which don’t require too much of your input, by way of time, effort, money, etc, but should they pay off, these are risks from which you stand to gain a lot.

If you decide to play lotto online with some small change you had left over from an online purchase for instance, that’s perhaps a risk you can afford to take with negligible consequences to consider, while our little game of drinking-roulette on the other hand had us paying heavily with the state in which our bodies were for the rest of the weekend.