Choices (2/17/2010)

Last night, I played a game that I recently purchased with my children. It is called "Blokus," and the objective of the game is to lay as many of your different shaped pieces on the board and prevent your opponents from laying theirs down. The strategy I employed was to lay down my largest and most strangely shaped pieces first so that my smaller and more conventional shaped pieces would be left as the board filled up. My children, however, did not quite grasp this strategy, so as the game progressed I still had pieces to play after they had run out of options.

This game made for an easy transition into a discussion about choices. Most individual choices we make will have little to no impact at the moment in which they are made, but with each additional decision made, the aggregate effect is one of establishing patterns that direct what future choices we make. In the case of the game, using the easy pieces first left my children with difficult choices to make later on, and in the end it meant that there were pieces they were unable to play.

In life, the choices we make on a small scale largely help shape the more critical decisions we will have to make. In other words, making the correct choice at the moment of crisis will be far easier if we have made a thousand smaller decisions to choose the right before that time. So while it was just a game we were playing last night, it helped me teach my children a much more valuable lesson about character and the importance of each decision, no matter how small.