Hey friend,
Happy Monday!
We officially have no more Sundays without football for the rest of the year and I’m excited to see what this season brings.
One of my favorite parts about the game is the athletic mindset and the ability to literally watch them push themselves past their own limits. With football being such a high contact sport, we know that the game is very physical, but so much of it is mental too.
And as we enter a new season, it’s also a reminder that our favorite athletes may or may not have the season we’re hoping for. We’ll celebrate them when things go well, but I also think there’s something to be said for staying with them throughout the journey. If you’re anything like me, you might get a little emotionally tied up when your team loses a game, but a bad season or a setback doesn’t suddenly erase how talented the players are. It’s impossible to win every game, it just comes with the nature of sport. And the losses sometimes make the wins even sweeter.
We know I talk about Jalen Hurts a lot here, but he recently said in an interview that the football field is one of the very few places where he feels he can be himself.
And yet, I can’t ignore that the game has also broken his heart in some ways.
He’s talked about how, despite how well he played in Super Bowl LVII, it still wasn’t enough to win. And that outcome left him feeling empty.
The parallel is kind of jarring when you think about it. The thing you love the most can still be the thing that breaks your heart.
Because we know how the story ended, and that he got back to the Super Bowl and won, it’s really easy to skip over the parts where he didn’t win.
But two seasons of uncertainty is still two seasons of uncertainty.
There was honestly no guarantee he would get another chance.
We can look at any athlete who eventually won a championship, broke a record, or finally got their moment and think, “Oh, of course they kept going. Look at how it turned out.”
But they didn’t have the privilege of knowing the ending while they were living through the losses, setbacks, disappointments, and the almosts.
They just had to keep living through the middle.
Sports and life feel one and the same to me.
I’ve had my own share of “almosts.” Things I thought would happen by now, only to find myself back in that place of uncertainty again.
But I’m learning that being in the middle of the story can make it really hard to see anything beyond it.
And when enough almosts pile up, it becomes really easy to believe that it’s just the way it always will be.
So if you’re in an “almost” season right now, I just want to leave you with this:
Almost isn’t the end of your story, it’s just one part before the next chapter.
You don’t get to skip to the ending, and maybe that’s the hardest part right now, living the middle without knowing how everything turns out.
But every athlete who ever made it through their almost season had to live through it with the same uncertainty, and most of them probably didn’t feel like they were about to make it, right up until they did.
So keep showing up for your own story the way we show up for our teams, even in the losing seasons.
Your almost is not your ending. It’s just the middle.
As always, Go Birds!
<3
I read that GQ article, too. Did you feel like the interviewer missed something?
Love the message in this one