I was paging through the local newspaper this morning and happened across the area’s high school football scores. I chuckled as I remembered the year our junior high school’s team got off to a dismal start. After losing their opening game 37-0, they went on to lose the next one by an even more crushing 67-0. Ouch. But eventually, they tasted victory and held their own for the rest of the season.
When you think about it, all the games we play—even the ones we call “life”—are a bit like experiments. And as Buckminster Fuller said, “There’s no such thing as a failed experiment, “only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”
Losing isn’t the same thing as failure. You form your strategies and put them into play the best you can. You bring all you know to the game; you call on all your experience.
But life is full of mysteries and variables, and the only way to learn more is to do the experiment, to play the game. Sometimes it all comes together just the way you had hoped. Sometimes it doesn’t. Accidents happen. We make mistakes. We get reminded that we’re mere human beings. But win or lose, we always come away knowing more than we did before we took the leap.
It’s the unpredictability of life that makes it interesting, after all – and fun.
You may think that you’d like to know what the remainder of the day holds, or what tomorrow or next week will bring. But if you did know, life would soon become one long and tedious déjà vu. Surprises keep us awake – and show us where we need to be paying more attention. They teach us. They give us new opportunities to use our strengths and talents and to develop them.
I hope when the coaches of losing football teams sit down with their players that they point out what the team did well and help them to do it even better. I hope they’ll help the kids discover how they can bring their strengths and talents to improve in the areas where they’re weak. And more than anything, I hope they tell their players that losing isn’t failure, and fill them with enthusiasm for learning more about playing the game, and loving it, win or lose.
I hope the next time you stumble, when something doesn’t work out the way you wanted, that you’ll remember it’s just one of life’s unexpected outcomes, meant to lead you onward, to make you better next time, and to unveil a few more of its mysteries for you.
Wishing you a week winning – however things go.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Keith Johnston from Pixabay