All or nothing or nothing at all Feb. 9, 2025
“It’s all or nothing,” my childhood friend once told me in
describing how he gambles, at the race track, in Atlantic City casinos, or for
that matter, life itself. “Why hold back when you really have nothing to lose.”
By this he meant if he couldn’t get what he wanted, couldn’t
win the jackpot, then he’s already lost and keeping something in reserve seemed
stupid to him. Sop was the idea of settling for something less than what he
wanted in the first place.
“What’s the point?” he told me. “If you don’t go for it all;
you won’t get it all.
I asked him what if he ended up getting nothing at the end
of the game.
He just shrugged.
“We’re all going to end up in the same place eventually,” he
said. “Then it won’t matter if you’ve won or lost, rich or poor. Part of the fun
is knowing you might break out at any moment, get something you want, and if
you lose it again, who cares? At least, you tried, and maybe got it once, on
your own terms.”
How all this panned out for him later in life, I can’t say.
I lost touch with him just after high school, where he kept gambling, winning
some, losing some. He just didn’t give up.”
Sometimes I think he got it all, and brought his own island
like he said he would, and is seated under a palm tree laughing at the rest of
us.
But even if he lost, I could imagine him deliberately getting
shipwrecked so he could be there, sending out no message in a bottle for the
rest of us to find, living life on his own terms and satisfied at it.
Comments
Post a Comment