soccer

I think my personal curse is that I love playing most sports, but I'm not particularly good at any of them.  At this stage of life I'm far less competitive than I used to be, however.  So, I can get a lot of enjoyment out of a losing effort.

In the past few months I have become re-acquainted with soccer.  I played when I was in early elementary, but have barely ever played since.  Some people from our church formed a team on a co-ed, novice soccer league, and I decided I'd join. As with many sports, I've always assumed there is more to the sport than I understood, and I've learned that this is one of the few times that my assumptions were correct.

Through a short season of games I am working on improving my poor form in everything from kicking to running, and I'm learning how pathetic my endurance is, even with my recent bout of exercising.  Enough others on our team are as new as I am that our team is objectively the worst-performing one in the league.  However, winning really isn't everything.  This is one of the most consistently fun things I've chosen to do in a long while.  I really look forward to our Friday night games for little reason other than the fact that I enjoy playing sports.

I used to think that my interest in playing sports was directly tied to my being a very competitive person.  Honestly, now that I am less competitive I enjoy playing them more.  There is less pressure to do well, and I can focus on small accomplishments during the game rather than whether our team won.  Every week I'm able to tally a few accomplishments I'm proud of to offset the embarrassing things I'm doing on the field.

Being on a losing team has also provided the opportunity for me to talk to our kids about being a good loser.  I understand kids getting mad when they lose, but I have been able to point out to my son especially how everyone on our team is very happy after the game, even when we get trounced.  It's one thing to say that keeping a good attitude when losing is important, but it's another thing to be able to illustrate the appropriate attitude and behavior.

Our team is still searching for that first win.  Maybe when we get that I'll get a new burst of competitiveness.  For now, I'm just enjoying the journey.

hero in my own story

I don't have many heroes.  It's possible I don't have any heroes.  It may be me avoiding being vulnerable, but I've found that placing people on a pedestal just guarantees that they're going to disappoint in some way later on because no one is perfect.

Even though I don't have heroes, and I don't explicitly think of myself as a hero, I think there's a strong tendency for men at least to think of themselves as the hero of their own life narrative.  I know I want to.  I suspect women are similar.  I know that I want to think that every difficulty I confront is a heroic challenge, and everyone who causes me trouble is a remorseless villain.  This just allows me to feel righteous when I take confrontational steps to do something for my own benefit.

Since I decided a few years ago that most people are living as the heroes of their own personal narratives, this has greatly reduced the animosity I feel for people who are rude, obnoxious, selfish, or otherwise unbearable.  I don't enjoy them, but they are easier to tolerate.  In their narrative they have convinced themselves that they are heroically confronting those who act in some unjust way toward them.

This is important in understanding how to deal with difficult people.  If I want to affect their behavior I have to remove their justifications by reacting in a way that is not unjust in their narrative.  If they're a sociopath or a psychopath I might not be able to do that.  If they're a more typical human, just being genuinely empathetic usually ruins the hero narrative in their mind, because it's hard to think of someone as a villain if they're being empathetic.

One of the things that I have long disliked in stories that I couldn't articulate for the longest time were villains whose primary purpose was being evil for the sake of it.  I am sure that even Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot convinced themselves that their actions were right and just.  Even psychopaths seek to justify their actions, if only by defining the fulfillment of their desires as the primary justification for everything.  To have a character characterized as being evil with no internal justification feels off.

This is also one thing that bugs me about many (not all) conspiracy theories.  The theories are frequently more focused on casting a person or a group of people as a villain than they are at presenting a rational justification for what would really motivate the behavior in question.