That's Baseball. That's Life.

‪Sometimes you strike out. Sometimes you strike out looking. Sometimes you hit a ball great only to have it land right where the defender is positioned. Sometimes the defense makes a great play. Sometimes you throw a wild pitch. Sometimes the ball goes between your legs. Sometimes the ball pops out of your glove. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you lose badly. ‬

‪That's baseball. That's sports. That's life. ‬

Our baseball team, my son's baseball team, the baseball team that I help coach went 0-5 last weekend.

Ouch. That's a lot of losing without any winning. It's easy to lose hope and become despondent when you lose five games in a row. 

Nonetheless, life is about perspective. Where are your silver linings? This was not time wasted. We got to play baseball. We got to compete. We got to experience, firsthand, the things that make sports great; we got to experience the things that build character.

A few days later, I read June 30th's entry in The Daily Stoic. "The Obstacle is the Way." What better opportunity for the nine year old kids on our team to practice, "the Stoic exercise of turning obstacles upside down, which takes one negative circumstance and uses it as an opportunity to practice an unintended virtue or form of excellence." (Holiday, Ryan. The Daily Stoic. New York, Portfolio/Penguin, 2016, 196.)

This is what I love about sports. Failure is a regular occurrence, and that makes for the ideal learning opportunity. In baseball, each at bat, each inning, each game is a new opportunity to do better than you did the time before.

"Every impediment can advance action in some form or another." (Holiday, The Daily Stoic, 196.)