The Old College Try

Ben:

I'm a sucker for inspirational sports movies. Take Rudy, for instance. He's a small fry from a blue collar family who wants to make his father proud by playing football for Notre Dame. His dream is a long shot at best, given his stature, but he goes for it just the same. The movie then goes on to chronicle his journey toward his goal. It culminates, of course, in him reaching his goal (after a fashion). The movie is chock full of memorable quotes and sweeping orchestral arrangements, and, yes, it's also filled to the brim with sentimentality, but hey, it's Hollywood.

During Rudy (as well as similar movies), they play montages of the protagonist doing various things such as working out and practicing. Interwoven with those scenes are others showing repeated attempts and failures at doing various tasks to demonstrate progress (or lack of). After a few minutes of footage that has you cheering breathlessly for the hero, BAM! - he's in a position to realize his dream.

Yeah. The montage part's crap. There's nothing instant about what he did.

Goal reaching is arduous, time consuming, stressful, and even boring at times. For example, take what I endured last night. After a full day of pouring over tax accounting pages and scrutinizing every detail, I discovered late at night that I was utterly unprepared for the homework yet to be done. I experienced doubt and frustration, and, yeah, I was ticked off a bit (thank God for Esther, who talked me off the ledge, LOL).

So, why reach? If it's such a pain in the butt and there's no guarantee of success, why try at all? There are so many positive byproducts of trying to reach a goal even if you don't reach it. Take weight loss, for example. You decide you want to lose 30 pounds, so you join a Thursday night exercise group, cut some calories, and walk in the mornings. Weeks pass, though, and you lost 15 pounds instead of 30. Well, considering you began dating someone from your Thursday night group, you reconnected with an old friend on your morning walks, and you sleep better and have more energy, I'd say that even though you didn't meet your goal, you still improved your life in trying to reach it.

What can be gained if I fall flat on my face in school? Well, I've met some extraordinary people, my vocabulary is stronger, I've learned quite a bit about the world and myself, and even if I don't hit it out of the ballpark this semester, I've still got all the credits I've earned thus far, and I won't stop reaching for that next handhold on my climb up.

Understand that when you do decide to reach for something in life, there will be setbacks and frustrations along the way. Budget those in along with the extra time it may take for you to get there. It falls back to what we talked about before: tailor your expectations so you don't feel defeated when you don't teleport directly to your objective.

My problem began when I ignored my own advice, set my expectations impossibly high, and assumed a doom-and-gloom scenario all because I didn't understand how to research a tax issue. That's a V8 facepalm-worthy moment if there ever was one.

Also? I think Rudy's greatest accomplishment was not reaching his athletic goal, but rather the fact that he graduated Notre Dame with a Bachelor's degree! I didn't give that aspect of the movie much thought at the time, but now that I'm climbing the undergraduate ladder myself, I have a new-found respect for anyone who tries to better themselves through higher education.

(On a side note, thank you to all who've been joining us! We're having an absolute blast writing our blog and we hope you're getting something out of it, too.)



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Esther:

An educational feature of marriage, or of just living and working so closely with someone, is the opportunity to compare and contrast each other's strengths and weaknesses.  If you're smart (and I am), you will capitalize on the other person's strengths.  Early on, for example, I was successful in impressing upon Ben the remarkable talent he had for cooking and doing laundry.  But I digress.

I've always found it odd that both sayings hold true: "opposites attract," yet "birds of a feather flock together."  On the other hand, some people are so alike they can't stand each other, while others are so different from each other that they never learn how to relate.  Maybe one component of a successful relationship is that perfect chemical balance between similar and dissimilar.

In social settings, Ben and I tend to raise eyebrows, prompt chuckles, or elicit the comment, "Oh no, there's two of you?"  It's true we do share a remarkable number of interests, tastes, opinions, values, personality traits, and the suchlike. Therefore, it's always a little surprising to be reminded of our polar differences: his morning to my night, my spontaneity to his plans, his concrete to my abstract, my gypsy to his hobbit.  These differences are double-edged swords, each of them.  At times, we weave the perfect dance of leading or following according to whose strengths the situation requires.  At other times, we trip all over each other's feet and sit out the remainder of the song, wondering how we lost the rhythm.

[The real fun begins when we chance upon a shared trait; say, a weakness.  Ben and I are both anxiety-prone, so sometimes I talk him off the ledge, sometimes he talks me off the ledge, and sometimes we're both on the ledge together, in a display of hysteria I suspect would amuse onlookers.]

One of my husband's strengths I don't yet possess (but hope to cultivate) is his relentless pursuit of goals.  I've never before seen someone conquer goal after goal and then stare down the next goal, as if to warn it, "I'm coming for you next."  Even in those dark moments of self-doubt, his determination remains untouched.

I haven't given my goals "the old college try."  I haven't even properly fleshed them out as goals, but kept them nebulous wishes.  It would sound noble to say this was because I was too busy being a caregiver and, later, a single mother, but those life situations were probably just comfortable cop-outs.  From childhood on, I've been afraid to try.  Afraid to cartwheel and risk getting scraped.  Afraid to rebel and call down parental wrath upon myself.  Afraid to venture too far from familiar hurts.

This fear is without excuse when I consider my husband, who has seen death and the end of everything, and still got up the next morning, and the next, and the next, and didn't just survive things - he started changing things.  He's spurred me to make a few daring grabs at my own goals, little goals, yes, but goals, nonetheless.

Fear - of failure, success, humiliation, and the unknown - churns in my gut each time I reach for something I care about, but I'll keep reaching.  In time, maybe the training wheels can come off and I can go after bigger goals.  Maybe one day I'll even have the courage to stare down one of the really big ones and say, "You're next."