Growing up in the Chicago area, I had two choices. To be a White Sox or Cubs fan. I was always a Cubs fan. In fact in 8th grade at Gavin Grade School in Fox Lake, Illinois, I was listed as the potential first female baseball player on the Chicago Cubs team due to my ability to catch line drives.
It dawned on me today as a school friend of mine posted on Facebook information about the Cubs, that to be a Cubs fan you have to be an optimist. How else can one explain a life time of cheering on a team that never has seen a World Series win.
What does it say about a person who never gives up trying? What character fills a person to go out week after week, day after day and never give up, even when in the eyes of others you have failed?
My older son had the privilege to play football for his high school team that lost every game of the season. The boys were taking a ribbing from their fellow students, but the coaches would cheer them on along with the parents, and every week they would return to the field and go for it again.
I worked in the school at the time and also know how hard the coaches were taking these losses. It was especially hard as a rival school was ending their season with no losses—not only for the year, but seniors were graduating with no loss on record for the whole four years.
During the season I watched my husband and son go over every game, not with any great negative intensity, but looking at the little things within the loss that one could hang on to as an improvement. Week in and week out I would hear, “Now son, you did this great, now next week try doing two of those…” The next week my husband would let our son know that he indeed had done two, now next week try this…and so it went until the season ended. The end of every game they would find a way to celebrate in the face of losing. What a gift!
I was so taken by these moments with father and son, that I wrote the coaches and asked, “So ask me what team I would like my son to be on…the one who lost every game, or the one who won every game?”
The answer of course was the one who lost. How has a student been prepared for what life has to offer if they have not learned how to be a good looser—if they have not learned how to see the good that comes from a failure? The gift that was provided this father and son during that season was priceless.
I like being an optimist. I am taking oil painting lessons (I have never considered myself artistic or an artist) but wanting to take myself out of my comfort zone I jumped into the process. For every painting that I have hanging on my wall, are ten that did not turn out. But I learned with each failure, just as father taught his son, and the coach his team…for me, being an optimist is the only way to travel the road of life!
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