Dice Decisions

It was about 20 years ago that I first read Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, which was, to me, a wonderfully enlightening book about a man who makes decisions based on the roll of the dice.

The premise of the story is simple: starting out with just small and unimportant decisions, by the end of the book he's making all of the biggest choices in his life by the roll of the dice.

I About 12 years ago I felt I was at an impasse in my life: I'd ended a relationship with a girlfriend in Sweden, left my career in England as an actor because I felt it wasn't going anywhere and I'd hit forty. I'd sold the home I loved when I'd broken up with another woman some years before, and I felt I was drifting and unmotivated. For me, it was the classic mid life crisis. My sense of adventure had gone, my career hadn't happened the way I'd imagined it would when I was in my twenties, and life just felt numb at best. I was homeless, jobless, penniless, loveless and hitting middle age.

So I decided to roll the dice.


I think it had been some things I'd witnessed in the years prior to this decision that made me commit to it: I'd had a lot of things fall apart in my life - home in Brighton, long term relationship, stability, and trust in "the system", as well as a profound sense of needing a different perspective. I'd come to the realisation that one of the most potent ways to recover oneself was to literally "recreate" onself - the real meaning of the word recreation, after all, and I found that there was no better way to do that than engage in some kind adventure.

Besides, life had become something absurd to me by 1997. A unique and precious gift not to be squandered, but at the same time not something to be held on to and preserved like some museum piece. As the saying goes, "To risk is to die, but to not risk is to not live". Life became something to me not that you waste, but equally not something you don't take out of the wrapper.

In the preceeding years I'd lived with the aftermath of my girlfriend's rape, her breakdown, my breakdown, a serious car wreck in which I saw people go from happy, vacationing people to broken, bloody, dying and wretched souls in minutes. Other, bizarre coincidences occurred that seemed to be telling me life can be taken away in an instant; I found a man seriously injured and dying on the beach in the middle of the night - had I not found him in time, would most certainly have died. Others' ordeals were like messages to me: live life NOW! I came to the conclusion that life simply had to be lived with real courage and a sense of awe and adventure.

It had dawned on me that decisions made by The Universe, Nature, Chance - call it what you will - made careful plans a silly idea. John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans; and to me, the idea of making plans just seemed futile. One can make the most careful plans, I thought; dedicate one's life to something, just to see those hopes dashed at the most pointless and ridiculously ironic moment. And I was fed up with waiting for life to come to me. I must have been about ten when I first read that passage by Thoreau: Most men live lives of quiet desperation...

If I was going to be desperate, you could be damn sure I was going down with a fight. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!, as Dylan Thomas once wrote.

I gave myself six options of where I'd be going: India, Australia, South of France, USA, Stay in the UK, or go back to Spain, where I'd lived in 1992. I'd not made it to Barcelona as I'd originally intended, as I'd witnessed the horrendous car wreck that spooked me and sent me back to England and a massive breakdown of my own. I'd wanted to see the Guadi architecture there. Some day I will, I know. Just not yet. But back to the dice...

The concept is easy: each side, each number on the dice is assigned an outcome. If you roll a two and two is assigned to, say, "go to Australia now", then that's what you have to do. It means surrendering to fate, you might say. You can do anything with your options: they can be around what you're going to eat, where you're going to go, what you're going to wear, say, drink...You can use them to throw in some daring, too: you can give yourself a great excuse to break out of comfort zones by rolling the dice. Wanna risk being a slut for the night? Do something completely out of character, just for the dare of it? The dice can help you.

And so The Dice - my dice - fell on the USA. And so on April 10th 1997 I came to America with a guitar, a suitcase hastily filled with a few bits and pieces - some quite absurd - and $350 in cash. No credit cards, no contacts, no sleeping bag; a small rucksack with a Teddy Bear tied across it, and a newly restored sense of adventure.

I flew into Phoenix Arizona as a symbol of rebirth (even though the extra price of the ticket cut into my very limited funds) and that was that.

That was my first major dice decision.

Watch this space for some more...