"There aren't enough hours in the day." I agree, but I'd like to append: "There aren't enough hours in the day, but there are too many ten-minutes in the day." You know that irritating block of time that's too short for a nap and too long to absorb with a little dawdling? The one between the time you get home and the time your favorite TV show comes on? The one between when you wake up and when your alarm clock will go off? Yeah. There are lots of them.
So I often resort to the packing peanuts of life: windows games. Solitaire is the most common, but minesweeper is a close second. There's plenty to say about solitaire, but for the moment I'm going to dwell on minesweeper. If you haven't played it before, it's a game that begins with a grid of boxes that contain either a bomb or nothing. If you click on a box that contains nothing, it will show a number indicating the number of adjacent bombs. The object of the game is to find all the bombs and mark them.
The first minute or so is pretty easy. If a box has one adjacent bomb and there's only unopened box, it's obviously a bomb. If a box has eight adjacent bombs, then all the surrounding squares are bombs. But sooner or later, all those tricks are exhausted and you get to a point where you have no choice but to guess. And suddenly all your hard work could disappear when you click a bomb and it explodes.
It feels like deja vu. The first nineteen years of my life, despite their complications, were mapped out. Do my homework, make friends, graduate; any bombs that went off were results of my carelessness. Then all the easy decisions were used up, and I had no choice but to guess. Any choice could end up being a bomb. Thankfully, life isn't quite as unforgiving as minesweeper. Making the wrong choice doesn't end the game; but it can mean a lot of hard work wasted and a broken heart to fix.
I learned something from minesweeper. When I first started playing, after reaching that plateau I would sit there and deliberate for minutes at a time. After working on this puzzle for ten minutes, how could I risk it all without proper consideration? But at some point I realized that my consideration never made the decision clearer or easier. The best course of action was to act quickly and decisively. If I chose a bomb, I would start a new game and try again until I succeeded.
Choosing to risk my livelihood to try to become a poke dealer has been anything but a safe bet. At any point the powers that be could have deemed me unworthy, and just that fast I would have been at square one. Even now, a single disaster tonight--our opening night for the VIPs of the poker world--could conceivably leave me broke and jobless. The pressure is great and the stress is high, but I know that all I can do is make decisions quickly and decisively based on all the information I have. If it turns out badly, I'll pick myself up and start again.
And sometimes that decisiveness saves you time and energy. Sometimes it's possible to piece together some of those odd moments and turn those awkward ten-minute doldrums into one more hour in the day. There aren't enough of them, you know.
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That's it! Shalom,
Dan
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