“That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.” – Richard Bach It was Saturday and I had driven all the way down to Salinas. No offense to anyone who lives in Salinas, but it isn’t on my top ten places to visit list. And if you never listen to another thing I say, listen to this. It shouldn’t be on yours either.

Never the less, there I was sitting on a hard plastic molded seat looking out at a football field that was framed by a cattle yard. It was a cool evening and the sun was going down. The field was dotted with cardinal and gold behemoths smattered around like small plastic army men placed in a random pattern that made no sense to anyone, least of all the person who put them there. There was a faint smell of hotdogs in the air and the smell of cattle. Don’t forget the smell of cattle.

And we were losing. Again.

Losing is never easy. Last year at this time we were un-defeated, as in never lost. Un-defeated. It has a nice ring to it. We had a good team. A great team. A phenomenal team. We were, after all, un-defeated.

This year, however, we were un-victorious. As in no wins. Three games into it and not a single one.

Un-victorious clearly does not have the same ring to it.

After the game I kvetched with the other parents of the cardinal and gold behemoths. Everything was wrong. Everything. They weren’t running fast enough. Or catching the balls. Or looking down field. Or trying hard enough. They just didn’t know, couldn’t know. We were un-defeated last year. Did they not realize that un-victorious was not an option?

I stood outside the locker room waiting for my very own cardinal and gold behemoth. “Well?” I said to the offensive line coach as though he was supposed to say something to me that made it all make sense. “Well?”

“We have a lot of opportunities to grow,” he said and I could swear I saw just the slightest glimmer of a smile as the light from the locker room cut the darkness of the night.

We have a lot of opportunities to grow.

A while back I had the opportunity to interview a basketball coach from a nearby high school. I wanted to know how he used his role as a coach to teach life lessons. The kind of lessons that change you and teach you about yourself and who you can become.

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant,” he said. It was a quote from Horace, an ancient Roman poet. “One of my coaches said that to me many years ago after the team suffered a big loss. It always stuck with me. I try to teach that to the boys I coach.”

Challenges are opportunities to grow.

On Thursday evening, Sandra came into writing group. The hood of her camouflage sweatshirt was pulled up over her head and her eyes were barely visible. “I’m not going to stay,” she said, her voice dripping with pain. “I’ve had a really bad day and I’m just not up to writing tonight.”

“Sit down,” I said. “Tell us what’s going on,” and she proceeded to tell us about receiving an F on a school writing assignment that she had spent hours working on.

Sandra is back in school after a very long time on the streets. She’s a brilliant writer who has written a book that sits unpublished in a plastic grocery bag in her small efficiency apartment. She’s loaded herself up with classes at the local community college and she has dreams of opening a group home for girls who have no one to believe in them. Girls whose lives have been filled with things that should never happen. Girls like her. She is brave and courageous and resilient and this hit her hard.

“I don’t usually cry,” she said as she wiped the tears from her face. “I’m not a crier.”

“It’s OK,” one of the other writers said. “I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.” And after a brief discussion, we wrote.

Yesterdays

“You filled a bowl up with my yesterdays

And told me to eat yesterday’s pain.

The brutal things that I put away so long ago

You placed them there and forced them down my throat.

My failures and my unwanted self destruction,

Running for my life to escape yesterday.

Funny how yesterday caught up to me.

In just the blink of my soul there yesterday sat

And confronted me.

Yesterday never let me get to know tomorrow because of its jealousy.

Some things never really change.

Places and faces, people seldom do.

But yesterday stays the same

That is certainly true.

While I ate yesterday swallowing every spoonful again

I remembered that I ran from yesterday

Skipped tomorrow

And here I stay,

Walking in today.”

She put her pen down and looked around the room at the faces at the table, the faces of the friends that had walked along beside her. “I’m going to talk to her,” she said aloud. “I don’t deserve an F.”

“You don’t,” they said. “You are a brilliant writer.”

The next week she came back to group. “I got a C.” she said her face beaming with pride. “I got a C.” She had spoken to the professor, made her case. “What do I need to learn?” she said. “Help me learn what I need to learn.”

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.”

On the practice field there are changes. Positions are changed, schemes are rehearsed, skills are sharpened. Hard work. There is no grumbling. Getting better is not negotiable. Friday night there is another game, another chance to get better. Another opportunity to grow.

It’s not about the grade or the final score.

Life is full of challenges. Life lessons are everywhere. On the football field, the classroom and all around us, if we only look.

We have, it turns out, lots of opportunities to grow.