Root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win, it’s a shame.
For it’s one, two, three strikes, you’re out,
At the old ball game.
Any baseball fan recognizes those lines from the song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The famous song epitomizes the experience of attending a sporting event: load me up on junk food and let me cheer my brains out.
Few things in life beat the feeling of rooting your team to victory. Fans experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows but they keep coming back, game after game, to cheer for their squad to do great things.
Recently I realized something…when it comes to rooting for myself to do great things, I do not root nearly as hard as I do my favorite teams.
In fact, I don’t even root that optimistically (or realistically) for myself.
Let me explain.
I love Arizona State University football. I watch every game I can and some of my fondest memories are victories by the Sun Devils. I would never root for something negative to happen to them.
But I can recall numerous times where I rooted for negative things to occur in my own life. Once I even rooted for a volcano to destroy the city I was living in. Seriously.
When I was a freshman in college, I attended a small school in western Washington. The school was located in a tiny city that didn’t have much going for it. The city was so small that the biggest news on campus was that a Cold Stone Creamery just opened in town. People were so excited about the ice cream store opening that they would schedule trips to the shop as if they were planning trips overseas.
“A bunch of us are planning a trip to Cold Stone on Saturday, you in?” I would be asked.
“Sure, but why are we talking about it now? It’s Tuesday,” I would respond.
That is an example of a real conversation that took place all too often.
Shorty into my time there I realized that I did not like the combination of small town mixed with rainy weather 24/7. I was homesick and I decided that I would transfer back to sunny Phoenix, Arizona, where Cold Stone Creameries were nothing special.
I was happy with my decision to return to the sunshine, but only one problem…I had to wait until the semester ended to go home. Time seemed to drag on before I would be able to leave.
I joke about it now, but I was in a bad spot and even starting wishing absurd things would happen so that I could get out of Washington before school ended.
Around that time, Mount St. Helens erupted. The volcano was more than 120 miles from my campus, but my warped brain saw this as an opportunity to get out of town early. I envisioned a situation where the volcanic eruption would increase and eventually make its way to the city, maybe even taking out the Cold Stone Creamery in the process.
Obviously, that never happened. The eruption at Mount St. Helens was mild and it had no impact on my life. Nevertheless, I remember being disappointed that the volcano didn’t get worse.
I can’t believe I would root for something like that. I would never root for lava to take out an ASU football game, no matter how bad they were losing, so why would I root for such a thing to occur in my own life?
Not only did I not even think about the destruction and loss of lives that the volcanic eruption would cause, but I completely bought into the weird fantasy that such a thing could even happen. I totally disregarded the likelihood of the possibility.
Instead of rooting for something positive and possible, such as meeting a new friend or finding a new hobby that would make my time enjoyable, I rooted for something negative and absurd, like a volcanic eruption to travel 150 miles, take out a school and an ice cream shop and force me back to Arizona.
I can’t be the only one to think like that, and that is sad.
Maybe you have never wanted lava to engulf your town, but chances are you have rooted for something negative in your life. We spend too much time focusing on the negative that when we start to brainstorm change we do so by creating more negative.
Why do we do this in our lives when we would never dream of doing so for our favorite team? Maybe it is time we start thinking of ourselves as the home team and root, root, root for something positive.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
