We have other flowers blooming around the yard. I wish I knew the names of the flowers. There is a light wispy purple flower that sort of likes an Echinacea flower. There was one purple flower that looked like a Jamaican with a lot of short, tightly compressed dread locks, but it seems to have died now or at least faded away. There were some yellow ones that appeared the same way. I should take the time to get to know these flowers personally. Perhaps spend some time with them, enjoy a drink of sunlight together, sit and talk about the weather for a spell. I imagine most flowers disliking the nearing cold much more than I do. If I could, seriously, I would dig every single flower out of the earth and bring it in for the winter.
Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. I would like to see them again next year. Next year I will spend some time with them. Richard Dawkins, eminent scientist, ardent Darwinist, passionate atheist, believes that flowers exist merely for the sake of their own DNA—they are selfish. That seems to me to be rather short sighted. Flowers have so much more to offer, maybe not for me or us, but at least for the bees that like to sleep in their soft beds get high on their pollen. (I love watching bees gather so much pollen they can hardly fly and when they do it is sort of like a drunken stagger—if one can fly a drunken stagger.) Flowers have to mean more than DNA. Do flowers serve DNA? Or does DNA serve flowers? Dawkins opts for the former; I opt for the latter.
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When I started, I was telling you about a sporting event that I watched the other day. At the end of the sporting even there was a winner. The winner cheered and smiled and jumped and acted as if he had just been awarded life eternal—I couldn’t think of anything that would rival life eternal, well maybe for the atheist non-existence. I sat and watched the winner jump around for a few minutes; I watched him being mobbed by his teammates; I saw the jubilation in his eyes—jubilation that only comes from winning. There is certainly no comparable elation that comes from losing. Losing adds weight to the heart, the soul, to the shoulders of the loser. Losing is crushing, humiliating and downright shameful. Winning lifts weight and gives wings to the winner. Who does not want to win? Who wants to lose? No one likes losing, no one likes a loser, and no one wants to spend time on a losing team. Winning, someone said the other night, is the cure for all ills. It is a tired mantra, to be sure, but it is true nonetheless.
Why is winning so preferable to losing? Why do we avoid losing as if it were some sort of plague? Some professional teams have caught this plague and have had it for a while, wonderfully. (By the way, why have children’s games been made into professional money making machines?) They cannot shake it no matter how many antibiotics they consume, inoculations they receive. The only cure for losing is winning. There is no magic drug, no amount of money, no particular person who will cure losing. It has to be cured by winning. Why is winning so preferable to losing?
Even in the games we do play as or with children or that children play among themselves winning is the priority. The object of playing a game, monopoly, for example, is not the enjoyment of being together with others who also enjoy playing, it is winning. Anyone who has ever lost at Monopoly will tell you that losing that game is the worst thing on the planet. They will never admit that they had nothing to do with the way the dice fell out of their hands and bounced on the table. Dice are fickle. How many lives have been interminably altered by the roll of a die or the tumble of the dice? Dice have an uncanny way of choosing winners and losers (think of Queequeg in Moby Dick). This is especially true when playing monopoly. I roll a five instead of a six and end upon New York Avenue with a hotel instead of Free Parking; I pay $1050 instead of collecting ten rounds of taxes and fees in the center of the board; I go bankrupt instead of becoming a thousanair. Dice are strange that way. I don’t think my mother has ever lost a game of Monopoly in her life. She has dice that prefer her hand instead of anyone else’s. Frankly, I enjoy playing Monopoly; I hate losing Monopoly. Still, anyone who has ever played knows that if you get stuck with Mediterranean and Baltic you are not going to beat the one who holds Park Place and Boardwalk. “If winning is not the object, why keep score?” Or, as in the case of Monopoly, “Why count the money?” Something tells me that winning does matter.
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The Red Sox beat the Yankees tonight. They came back from a 3-0 deficit to win four straight games en route to the World Series. Those were 25 of the happiest men on the face of the earth tonight. Try to tell them winning does not matter.
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Winning is a way of life. Personally, I hate losing, but I suffer it. I’m not a very good loser. I don’t fail well, but I have spent the majority of my earthly days losing. I have lost so often, succeeded so infrequently, that one might think I am a master at it, that I have written books about it. Sorry. I never played for a winning baseball team as a kid. I never played for a winning basketball team in high school. I lost every 1 mile race I ran in high school track and I still have no idea why the track coach let me do the long jump. I never played football in high school, but my high school team hardly ever won. I played soccer in the 4th or 5th grade; lost there too. I have been the minister of three different churches since college: failed, failed, failing. Somehow I have the idea that failing is equivalent to losing. I play golf sometimes and every time I play I lose to a man twice my age. I never made it to Eagle Scout like my dad. I did not last in the Marine Corps like my brother. I bailed on graduate school before I finished my first semester. At one of the churches I ministered to a friend had a nickname for me: Loser.
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In this world, we have a penchant for making a competition out of everything. Television networks compete for viewers and ratings. I just started reading a book about 9 men who made a competition out of racing sailboats around the world. The Red Sox beat the Yankees the population at large received many assurances from radio personalities that they would not, could not come back. I think the sun and moon are in competition with each other too. Light and dark are waging a war. War is a competition: who will win? Competition is about who can do the most, the best, or the quickest. Children are constantly racing or battling or in competition with one another over the most, it appears to adults, unimportant things imaginable: who can finish dinner first, who can take the quickest shower, who can race to the top of the steps the fastest. They compete over everything. Adults are not much better as is proved by noting the line-up of television programming available each day. I have recently become rather interested in a television show called Iron Chef, a Japanese television program about a competition involving, what else, cooking. At the end of each show, the voice over says, “Whose cuisine will reign supreme?” I have to laugh at the corny English voice-overs. And the cuisines may reign supreme to the tasters, but to me the cuisines look like something I scrape off the bottom of my shoe and discard in the wastebasket. The competition is, nevertheless, interesting to watch.
There are other competition shows on television too: The Great Race, Fear Factor, Survivor, Big Brother, the Swan, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, America’s Next Top Model, The Price is Right, Millionaire, Jeopardy, and a whole host of others to numerous to mention here. The object of every show is the same: come out on top, be the winner, be first. There’s even a show on now about who can lose the most weight. I think the most obvious competition going on is between the networks: Who can come up with the stupidest new competition and call it ‘Worth Watching’ or ‘Must See TV’? I have no use for any of that garbage.
Why the preoccupation with winning? Why does winning matter so much? Why am successful if I win, and, pejoratively, a loser if I lose? I made it this far did I not? I mean, there are hundreds and thousands, perhaps millions, of species that did not survive this long on the evolutionary ladder, or stair, or slide. I could have been a large wooly mammoth that slipped on a banana peel and fell through the ice only to be trapped like a fly in an ice cube. I could have been a too dumb dinosaur that looked at the pretty rocks falling from the sky and decided to go on eating instead of seeking shelter. I could have been one of the poor citizens of Pompeii trapped in the plumes of Vesuvius’ belch. I could have been a small child skipping rope on a sidewalk, unaware of the airplanes heading my way, and unaware of the rush of heat that would soon overwhelm Hiroshima or Nagasaki on an August day in 1945. I could have been. I could have been that gnat that I crushed against the table a while back, this past summer. Instead I am me. I could have been a Jewish man, or woman, or child, or dog living in Europe during the 1930’s and 1940’s. And of all the times I could have lost I did not. I could have been one of the several million sperms that did not reach my mothers egg. I could have been the object of a woman’s ‘choice.’ I guess one could say that since I made it this far I am ahead of the game. My selfish genes have given me new hope, although tomorrow someone’s car may take it away. Then, all the selfish genes in the world will amount to little more than dust and bones to be scattered into the breeze. Genes don’t help much when 2000 lbs of twisted steel and shattered glass are crushing bones and shredding muscle, tissues and cells.
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Winning is not all there is to life. Who wants to one of the Jurors that declared O.J. Simpson a ‘winner’? For that matter, would you want to be the sort of winner that O.J. is? Who wants to draw the shortest straw? Are there any real winners when it comes to war? Sometimes winning comes with and at a terrible price. I would hate to be a winner in a draft lottery. I would hate to be the winner of an early retirement decree. I’m not certain I would have wanted to win the draw for who would pilot the plane that dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wonder if the pilot of Enola Gay had any misgivings about being chosen the 'winner' of that contest? I would hate to be the winner of a dead pool. I would hate to be the winner of a ‘let’s see who can fall to earth the fastest without a parachute’ contest. My point is that there are some things, however absurd they may sound, that it would be better to lose. Although, a ‘let’s see who can fall to earth the fastest without a parachute contest’ probably involves quite a few losers, and not nearly enough winners. But I digress.
I like winning and I hate losing. I have done very little of the former, and a great deal of the latter. I cannot say that I am particularly thrilled with the way things have gone so far, but I don’t have much choice in the matter. CS Lewis lamented that he was not very athletic or interested in sports as a schoolboy; he was no loser. I am very interested in athletic competition; I am no winner. I would hate to have been one the millions of intermediary, deformed, species that did not make the last great leap into evolutionary survival. There was a bunch of losers. Can you imagine being the intermediary species between an early Trilobite and a later mole, or an early form of sponge and a later homo sapien? Can you imagine being one of those awkward species that lived sometime between being a giant, lumbering, flightless brachiosaur and a tiny, soaring sparrow? That must have been tough. Those intermediary species that scientists have been telling us must exist must have been strange looking things. Imagine for a moment the duckbilled platypus. Now, imagine the intermediary species. What gene would be selfish with that? That was definitely a Blind Watchmaker. I wonder sometimes if perhaps I am an intermediary species. It would make perfectly logical sense: I am a loser.
I looked out the window today. I walked through the yard too. I am interested in the multitude of flowers that are still growing and blooming in my back, side and front yard. Mums. Marigolds. Sunflowers. Xenias. Echinacea. Four O’Clocks. Bachelor Buttons. And several others that I cannot name. Even my garden pepper plants are still working, making blossoms, producing fruit. In my book they are winners. They have survived. They have held out through the wind, the rain, the fluctuating temperatures, the night, the day, the light, the dark, the animals, the droughts and the floods. They started as mere seeds smashed into the darkness of the soil. Then, through a cataclysmic event, they burst out of their seed pods, up through the soil, and took their first breath of air. They are the winners. They started as small seeds and grew into enormous trees that the birds and bees and grasshoppers and spiders nested in and perched on all summer long. They reproduced. Now the reproduction phase is over—the bees are quite gone for the year—and I suspect that they are lingering in the flower stage simply for the enjoyment of not having to work any more. Now it is their time. Now they can be beautiful for sake of beauty. I think we are winners when we no longer compete to win but to simply enjoy the thrill of the race, the heat of competition, the applause and songs of praise that come from the gallery: Bravo! Hear-Hear! Hooray! Go! Or, if you happen to be a flower: Beautiful! Gorgeous! Spectacular! Wow! (But this should not be construed so as to mean that we quit trying to be the winner. It is always good to crush the opposition under and unflinching, internal, compulsion for victory. Darwin or one of his clones called it Survival of the Fittest. As if the unfit could survive!)
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My day is nearly finished. I don’t know that I am entirely enthusiastic about it being finished. I could easily enjoy 10 or 15 more hours so that I could read or write. As it is, right now, I am watching and listening to my son as he plays a video game and tries to win. Winning! I beat a game tonight too, although, to be sure, I really lost: at the end of the game the cumulative time a player spends playing the game is flashed across the screen. I am not sure I am a winner for having spent that much time playing a game.
Some people that all there is to life is winning. They have a misunderstanding, I think, about the nature of losing. I believe that both are necessary to bring about a healthy human and both are necessary to bring about a healthy society. Many people are winners every single day. Many are losers. What I am trying to learn, and what I am trying to instill in my children, is that there is such a thing as being a good loser and being a good winner. Winning certainly matters or ‘they’ would not keep score. Losing matters too. One of them comes to us naturally; the other has to be learned. And if it has to be learned, then there must be a teacher.
