Sports New

This morning I tried to turn the radio to a station I used to regularly listen to and it had changed to sports news. I left the dial to espn and continued to work while they babbled about baseball and football. For eight hours I listened to a culture to which I am basically a stranger.It isn't that I don't understand sports, for the most part I do, I simply have never followed them. I know how many innings are in a baseball game, I understand the basics of football (though I never excelled at keeping score), and I can keep straight where most of the teams are from. However I barely know the most famous of players and have never remembered, or learned for that matter, the stats that keep many men interested in their favorite teams and players.

So I learned some interesting things today. The men on the radio talked a lot about their childhoods, about sports history, about the future of their industry. They were excited about what was to come in the NFL season. The tempo of the day was racing. Maybe it always has that hyped up element, maybe it was more so because it was a seasons opening day.

One of the former champs was talking about the importance of seeing each season for itself. He said that no matter what a team did to have the winning season the year before they needed to remember that each season was journey all its own. Every year must stand completely alone. A team can't go back and play the same game they did last year, the past is the past and each journey is completely different. New elements must be added, new skills learned, new stratgies discovered. Each team must adapt to the needs of this new journey.

I took away a life lesson. We can't expect to keep reliving our old ways of doing things. No matter how grand the past was, to reach success again we must stop reliving old glories and strive for a completely new kind of glory. Every stage of life can only be conqured when we remember that it is a different journey for a different reason.

This season isn't about learning the same lessons I did last season, it's about building on to the journey I've already had and changing in new ways. This brings me both hope and sorrow. Getting comfortable is never an option. Which sucks. But it means that I don't have to rely on parts of me that are used up and have been smashed to pieces. If I played basketball, for example, just because I can no longer dunk the ball doesn't mean my game is ruined, instead it give me an edge. Every other team would expect me to keep trying to dunk, what if instead I because an amazing defensive player? Or what if I set up other players on the court so they could excel? What if I changed it all and ended up adding more than the obvious to the game?

This feels a bit cheap. In fact, looking back at the last few days I feel a little like I've been struggling with the moral of the story and looking for an easy one. Maybe that's because an easy moral to all of this might make the pain and easier pill to swollow. Maybe there really are a few worthwhile moral of the story kinds of lessons to be learned. Maybe I've been drowning in a self-help binge after a self-destruction one. Give me sometime, maybe I'll go deeper.

For now I'm just picking up on a few parts of living that I have barely any experience in, like sports new.