It's not about winning.

Let’s just start this blog post with some wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut (in case you haven’t seen this before, I love it!):

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

Not a whole lot else to say, there is so much wisdom already here. I have wondered so often why I run. I know I will never be the first one over that finish line. It can be frustrating, especially when starting something new or even coming back to something we knew in another capacity of life. My love for this sport and my new found athleticism comes from my commitment to it, not to the winning of it. And now I get to spend 8 plus hours alone in the woods connecting to the earth and its beings because of that commitment. Imagine what you could do.