An Exercise in Poor Decision-Making

Yesterday, and last night more specifically, I had an experience with making poor choices. I was playing a role-playing game with a few friends, and my role was the captain of a starship. We learned that three colonies of civilians were about to be attacked, and we decided to help them evacuate, earning the ire of their attackers, who proceeded to attack us. Throughout the game session, my character made decisions that, despite seeming wise at the time, only led our party deeper and deeper into trouble. However, one of the worse decisions I made that evening was playing that game before (and, as it turned out, instead of) blogging.

 I have maintained a daily spiritual blog for years now. There are very, very few days that I have failed to blog for any reason other than not having access to the Internet. I could have blogged yesterday, easily. I had access to my blog the whole time. I even tried to blog from my phone at the last possible minute, but our starship was under attack, and a rationalized that a lot of my blog posts end up being late anyway, so I could just blog when the adventure was over, or when I got home. But the adventure took longer than I had expected, I stayed out much later than I had intended, and, ultimately, I failed to blog yesterday because I spent that time playing a game instead.

I'm not even satisfied with how the game turned out. My character made what turned out to be terrible decisions, and I dread what the repercussions of those decisions will be for him. I'm tempted to not participate in this particular game in the future, just so I don't have to deal with the consequences of what happened over the course of that game. But that would be cowardly and uninstructive. My character should deal with and learn from his mistakes, and so should I.

Rather than ignoring the fact that I didn't blog yesterday, I should call some attention to it and use the shame of my admission of guilt to encourage me to do better, to blog earlier, or at least to manage to blog at all. I should make my blog more of a priority, or at least a higher priority than playing a game with friends, even friends I rarely get to spend time with. As important as my social life is, my blog is more important, and it shouldn't have been too hard for me to pause the game long enough to write a paragraph about one's duty to help those in need, or some other trite nonsense like that. I should have blogged yesterday, but now I should at least learn from the fact that I didn't.