Last October I was cleaning out a desk drawer at the house and found 5 old dice. I had a flood of memories surrounding them.  My mother was an avid game player.  She would wait for us to get home from school to play some sort of game with her.  All the games I ever played with her involved dice or cards but the game I remember playing the most was Yahtzee.  We would play it every day.

Bill is not a game player.  The only time he will play is when we are camping and there is absolutely nothing else to do.  He won’t play Yahtzee with me because he feels there is no chance of winning.  This past weekend daughter Cait came up to Rowe for a visit.  I begged her to play Yahtzee with me but she said she won’t either because she feels there is no chance of winning.

Sister Sue and I play often.  We seem to be pretty even in our scores, one or the other always having some run of luck.  It has become a mini obsession actually.  We play whenever I am there.  We play when there is a spare moment or two – morning, afternoon, evening.  We play while we’re eating dinner.  It’s kind of a mindless game.  I can talk about anything else while we play.  I find myself with spare moments throwing the dice three times as I walk by them on the table to see what I come up with.

I’ve always thought of this game as an almost total game of chance.  You can’t control what you throw only how you score it.  I think the difference between those of us who are obsessed with it and those who rarely play is whether we play it safe or are willing to take a risk.  I risk it all with every throw, I’m always going for the Yahtzee.

I think you need to look at life the same way.  You need to take risks.  There are so many little choices every day. You should keep rolling those dice and come up with a great score.