LESSONS FROM THE GAME




       

So as I sit down to write, I’m a little bleary eyed from staying up to watch the final two games of the World Series where my long-suffering Cubbies finally brought it home.


        But as the photos and comments continue to fill social media, it occurs to me that there are lessons in this historic win for all of us--lessons we may sense but have not put into words.  So I have a quartet of options—you likely could add a few of your own. 


·         The plan was new. 

·         The key players are young. 

·         The leaders prepared.

·         The playing field, hostile.


PLAN.  If you were listening, you heard over and over again that Theo Epstein was trying something new.  Building from nothing (indeed 108 years without a championship is pretty much that). He did not look backwards to a glorious past…to old ways, old rules, old outcomes. He was writing a new chapter looking forward and creating a never-seen-before path and future.


PLAYERS. I know—I don’t like it either. I want to feel useful. I am useful.  But I’m no longer a key player, but in a supporting role. My job is to get out of the way enough for the growing talented to hope and shine. I’m not the first baseman, or pitcher or even catcher anymore…I’m a line coach. It’s important to always do an honest and perhaps searing inventory of who we are in the current situation at the current moment, and take a realistic part.


PREPARED LEADERSHIP.  During a post game interview a journalist asked Joe Maddon... “How do you get ready?”  Without a moments hesitation Maddon replied:  “…honestly the other thing is meditation. I love to meditate in the morning. I'm a big believer in meditation. Whether you want to call it prayer or meditation, whatever you want to call it, that to me is very, very helpful to just really get my mind right for the course of the day. So that when you do come to the moments, and you have to make a decision you feel convicted in that decision, and that is based on what you do prior to, during, and then after.”  Great leaders work from a clear, still center and not from the voices, advice, or pressures around them. 


PLAYING FIELD.  It would have been insanely awesome for the Cubs to have won the World Series at Wrigley Field.  Indeed the thousands that gathered there, hundreds of miles away from the actual game, was impressive.  But the final runs that put the Cubs ahead and the final out that sealed the victory was won at Progressive Field in Cleveland.  The game was won in a place where most voices were against them, on the very ground of their opponent.

 I find these lessons compelling in my own life.

 I could go on (and maybe I will at some time) about the players love of the game and one another.  I could go on about their goodness—which is a new dimension in a ‘high-ego” profession. Or how they kept saying they were doing this for those who went before… for people and for a place that was not their own.  I could say more, except it makes emotions roll down my cheeks.

  So this is just a reminder of the godly and goodly things I saw in a young bunch of guys known as the 2016 World Champion Cubs.  And hoping that others might take a look and learn from them too.



In peace and much, much joy,



Kathleen Bronagh Weller

THE CELTIC MONK

  


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