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Today is the 7th day of the Lunar (Chinese) New Year. It is also the symbolic birthday of all men, hence the name “renri”, or Men’s Day. In Singapore, we celebrate renri by purchasing a salad-like dish called LoHei that comes with a sashimi fish (salmon or abalone depending on your budget), shredded vegetables, pomelo shreds, golden-fried crisps, sweet sauce, sesame seeds and a tinge of XO. It’s served up on a big dish and as the ingredients are added to it, we will shout out wishes of good health, prosperity, and all things good and desired. After that, armed with a pair of chopsticks each, participants would scoop and toss the LoHei high up in the air. LoHei brings family, friends and colleagues together in a highly positive atmosphere. It’s the way the Chinese like to start the new year.

The LoHei session at Spiragram was extremely fun. We followed that with a sumptuous buffet and then an hour’s of blackjack. In case you didn’t know, most, if not all Chinese, will break all rules to gamble over the new year.

This entry is about the blackjack session that followed. I took on the banker role in the blackjack session. A frequent gambler (my favorite game being mahjong) myself, I had to admit I enjoyed the session a whole lot more than usual. Today, I saw some light in how I might be able to enjoy future gambling sessions:

1. On the get-go, I didn’t worry about losing because money lost is gained by a close group of colleagues. As the boss, I like the idea of colleagues getting an extra ‘bonus’ from me.
2. I didn’t focus on the cards, instead, I was present: I cajoled, teased, taunted and congratulated everyone as they took turns to draw their cards.
3. I took risks - with ‘nothing’ to lose, I was able to heighten the excitement in the air by going for unlikely wins such as drawing on a 17 or 18 and when I bombed out, I laughed the hardest. It’s amazing how much noise we made.

I had a lot of fun.

But this is not a post about how to go about your gambling. This post is about how to go about living your life. As they say, life’s a gamble. So logically, I can extend my gambling insights into the larger part of my life:

1. Rise above your fear of losing - we all have our fair share of living life well within our safety zone because of our fear of losing. This is because we’ve been brought up in a society that sees everything in terms of success and failure. If you can look beyond that myopic outlook on what life can offer to you, how different would your life be? Better yet, can you change the rules of the game from win-lose to win-win?
2. Be present and live the moment - no matter who you are, what you have is what is in front of you right now. If you’re sipping coffee, enjoy it. If you’re taking a puff, enjoy it. If you can savor every moment, every touch, every bite and every breathe of what life offers you, you will be a very happy man.
3. Up the ante and take bigger risks - once the society’s definition of winning and losing is all the same to you; and once you become fairly adept at enjoying your life in the present, you will be at a liberty to tune it up for more. Take risks. Go for gold.

As with all my posts, the “Gamble of Life” is something that came up to me today. I’m not a self-proclaimed guru that has all the right solutions for I am still trying out stuff that I write about everyday. I’d have (yet another) round of mahjong tonight with some friends and I’ll be approaching it in the same spirit as this afternoon.

If you do take the risk and take some of these ideas and try them out in your own life, please share them with me here.