Tip the Board

There’s a legend in our family of a certain Grampa who was famous for “accidentally” knocking over the crokinole board when things started to go bad. You could see the twinkle in his eye and a tiny smile he couldn’t hide, and you knew it was only a matter of seconds before his knee would hit the underside of the table and all the pieces would go flying. And everyone would roar with laughter, even the one who was winning.

It was as predictable as sunrise and far more fun than the game itself. When we start talking about Grampa, the crokinole board story is always retold. (In real life, he was renowned for his dogged determination to persevere. Crokinole was his outlet.)

Sometimes in the game of life it’s time to tip the board, if that can be done fair and square. You’re in a dead-end job, or a dead-end relationship, or you’re so far in debt that you’ll never see the light of day in a hundred lifetimes. There are a thousand reasons why sometimes you just need to say, “I’m not going to stay in this place anymore!”

You can’t ask for a re-set every time the going gets a little rough, because you’d never develop character or grow a spine. But sometimes you find yourself in what is essentially a “sunk cost” situation where throwing more time, money, resources, hope, or energy into a bad situation is just feeding a black hole from which nothing ever comes back.

Mostly, the test for whether or not it’s justified to tip the board is whether or not the game is reciprocating what you’re putting in. A cold marriage where one partner carries all the load and the other one rides free could be such a situation. A business partnership where you seem to be the one doing all the work while the others freeload and criticize. A business debt load where the bank makes untimely and unreasonable demands which effectively mean you’re working just to pay interest and carrying charges.

For those of us with high standards, pride, and a can-do spirit, tipping the board often seems galling and humiliating, an admission of failure. But in my thirty-seven years of legal practice, and from very personal experience, what I have seen is that those who cut the chains of an unreasonable bondage get over any remorse when, often for the first time in years, they get to stand out in the sunlight and breathe the clean air. And most of the people whose opinion really matters say, “What took you so long?”

Need to talk about a re-set? Drop me a note.