“A blog about playing the lottery? Every week the same – lost again. What else will there ever be to say? Talk about boring!”
My friend was not very excited when I told him about this blog. And I have to give him credit for nailing the “lost again” part of this enterprise. But this is about more than just winning or not. It’s about perseverance. It’s about the journey. It’s about the things that happen along the way. It’s about learning more about myself. It’s about what I count as winning. I will count it winning if I actually get 52 blogs written and posted.
That sounds silly to my friend. When it comes to the lottery, winning money is the only thing that counts as winning. And that’s ok. Because victory can, and should, be set by ourselves for ourselves. His victory would be winning numbers. My victory is writing this blog.
I have another friend who runs marathons. Actually I have a lot of friends, like at least one friend for any situation. Talk about privileged! But that’s a topic for another day. This friend will run in the next Boston Marathon. Apparently, you can’t just show up at the registration table and say “I want to run today.” You have to qualify. I don’t know all the details but he has been running marathons all over the Midwest qualify. And he did it! He qualified! For him, qualifying is winning. If he comes in first, that will be awesome beyond words. If he comes in last, he will have finished the marathon and he will be a winner. If he doesn’t finish, he will be disappointed, but he will still be a winner.
The mystery writer Dick Francis wrote in the novel Driving Force “No one should impose their own perception of fulfillment on anyone else.”
I like that. My fulfillment, my winning, is not the same as my first friend. I win every week I write and post a blog. I win every time I learn or experience something new. Of course, I would like to WIN BIG. But that is not and never was the main motivation of this exercise. To WIN BIG would be icing on the cake. But I am not eating cake so to speak. I am in a marathon, a marathon of blogs. As I said before, getting 52 blogs written and posted is my win. I’m almost half way finished in this marathon, almost halfway to reaching my self-determined fulfillment.
I keep buying lottery tickets. I keep losing. I keep learning and discovering. I keep writing. And I am not the least bit bored.