“Far bet­ter is it to dare mighty things, to win glor­i­ous tri­umphs even though checkered by fail­ure than to take rank with those poor spir­its who neither enjoy much nor suf­fer much because they live in the grey twi­light that knows neither vic­tory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt

There is never a need to try and express some­thing again when someone has done it before you and suc­ceeded in doing so. Risk is an integ­ral part of our lives and I strongly believe that those of us who have chosen to live this altern­at­ive life­style are delib­er­ately tak­ing risks.

We take the risk of being out­casts, simply because the major­ity does not under­stand this life­style, we risk being mis­un­der­stood by our closest friends and even our fam­il­ies. We risk rejec­tion and being out­casts simply because we like to do what oth­ers deem unac­cept­able, yet still we seem to rel­ish it.

Risk is a remark­able trait of our soci­et­ies and of human nature. I am cur­rently in the pro­cess of read­ing a book titled Against the Gods: The remark­able story of risk and it is partly to blame for this entry in my blog.

Mit­ig­at­ing Risk

Inter­ac­tions with my slave are more often than less based on me try­ing to mit­ig­ate risk. I under­stand and treas­ure that noth­ing is more import­ant to my girl than to see me happy, to please me and to obey me. I know that she is more than will­ing to go that one step fur­ther than she is com­fort­able to, just because I ask her to. Push­ing the bound­ar­ies of what one is con­form­able with is a risky busi­ness. I under­stand that.

Whenever I try to break down a taboo, whenever I try to ask for some­thing that is scary to her I am care­fully con­sid­er­ing the risks involved. The one I truly worry about it is the risk of me des­troy­ing that ulti­mate trust placed in me to know when it is enough and thus des­troy­ing our rela­tion­ship, everything else is just another factor to consider.

Depend­ing on what I am ask­ing of her, I will strike a bal­ance between what an accept­able risk is and what is not. Nat­ur­ally I am some­times in a pos­i­tion where I can­not safely pre­dict how risky some­thing is and that is when I trust on my instincts.

Poker, Gambling and slaves

I do not gamble and as such I do not play for money. Poker is a good example of what I am try­ing to write about when I say that I some­times simply go by instinct. When you look at the top poker cham­pi­on­ships in the world you will see famil­iar faces in famil­iar top pos­i­tion across many dif­fer­ent tournaments.

Poker does not have any fixed odds and it is con­sidered a game that is based purely on chance when you remove the human factor. The people you see are there because they have learned to go by instinct whenever they feel that they can­not read their oppon­ents odds by simply look­ing at their own cards. Those play­ers have learned to rely on other factors in the absence of a proper risk assess­ment for their next move.

What to Consider

I would hope that you can learn to do the same thing when inter­act­ing with your slave. I am very com­fort­able with what I am, being the owner of my slave. I love the power, the con­trol and the care, but what I also love is that I con­stantly have to pace myself and decide whether my own wishes are some­thing that she is cap­able of grant­ing me. When I think about risk, I usu­ally have a few things I always consider:

• Loc­a­tion — Where is this going to happen
• Mood — Does my slave need to be in a cer­tain mind-set prior to me intro­du­cing this idea
• Tools — Do I under­stand the tools I might want to use well enough
• Skill — Am I skilled enough with the afore­men­tioned tools to do this safely
• Pre­par­a­tion — Do I feel my slave should be sur­prised by this or does she need to be slowly pre­pared for it.

This is by no means a com­plete list and you should try to come up with you own, but it should give you a good idea which factors I try to con­sider before I make a decision. You also have to under­stand that none of the things I men­tioned above ends up being a labor­i­ous and long­win­ded task for me. I make my decision very quickly when I am intro­du­cing small changes, I spend a lot of time think­ing about it when I am intro­du­cing very big changes.

Bal­an­cing the Returns

Small changes are easier to sus­tain and less risky than big­ger ones and usu­ally the pay­out will be much more con­sist­ent. I am not after the big win, I already won my biggest hand when my slave allowed me to own her, I am after con­sist­ency. The hands I play are the small ones and I almost always win. With these small hands it is easy for me to mit­ig­ate the risk and when I do fail it is much easier to repair the dam­age done. Such a tac­tic requires a lot of patience but the cumu­lat­ive pay-out is simply enormous.

I love my slave and I want to see her happy all the time, even though she knows that being owned by me is risky.