Roulette 

The wheel spins.
The ball rolls and rolls
and falls
while the crowd stands entranced
as if waiting for their fate,
a fragile thing,
in the hands of chance,
foolishly gambling,
somehow believing
the risk is worth the reward
far more than reaching for what we want
and taking the chance
we might fail.

About this poem

Trusting our lives completely to fate, seems to me to be a cop-out. I am not much of a believer that things just happen. Most of the time we adult types set the stage for what happens in our lives, good and bad. Yes, things do happen, but if we’ve built our lives on a firm foundation; if we’ve actively done the work in our lives to set ourselves to succeed, the we stack the odds in our favor. And I’m all about stacking the odds.

Leaving life completely to fate releases us from responsibility for our own life. That can be comfortable. But it’s also a helpless place. I’ve lived there and it’s not a place I want to go back to.

Tom