Let’s take a trip down memory lane. It won’t be a long trip, since this happened this past December. After three months, 30ish games, 100 practices, my volleyball team made it to the National Championship game. In reality, any athlete knows that it took 15 years, thousands of practices, blood, sweat, tears, etc. etc. You know the story. But really, it is pretty cool to reach the pinnacle of the thing you’ve been working toward for so long. And we made it. We were so close to winning the whole damn thing.
Our path in the NCAA tournament was not easy. We won four games in five sets, which if you’re not a volleyball fan, means that it came down to the wire. For four games in a row, playing teams when their season was on the line, we came out on top.
We were lucky enough to play in front of our home crowd of nearly 2,000 for the first three games of the tournament, and winning the ticket to California for the Elite Eight was ELECTRIC. As a senior, seeing all of my people in our home gym cheering and standing and crying and hugging for this thing we were all a part of was so special.
I got this feeling though, before that win, when we were up the whole game and then suddenly the opposition came back and pushed our backs against the wall, that it wasn’t the whole winning thing that mattered. I know this sounds sooo cliche, but for the first time in my life, I really believed that the journey was more important than the destination.
Sure, the destination gives us all something to rally around. And don’t get me wrong, I am one of the most competitive people I know. I want to win– probably too much. But for the first time, I loosened my grip. Maybe it was the fact that I had dabbled in meditation on-and-off for the year previous, or that I attended a Christian school, so God always felt close. But for some reason, for the first time in my life, arguably when I should have cared about the outcome the most, I let go. It’s entirely possible I was just experiencing the crazy rush of chemicals in my body from the excitement of the game. Nevertheless, I said in my head: “I surrender this moment to you, God. Whatever happens, it is enough.”
We ended up winning that game. But 2,000 miles, a hundred fans including our college’s President traveling with us, a dozen news articles, three games, and two weeks later, I repeated that exact same mantra, prayer, whatever you want to call it. I meant it just as much as the first time. And you know what, we lost.
My point is this: sometimes you lose. Sometimes your career ends without having reached the tippity top of the mountain. Sometimes you cannot wrap it all up in a pretty little bow.
Do I wish we would have won the National Championship? Sure. That ring would have been pretty cool, and it’d look great on my resume. But I think we have this narrative in our heads that if we don’t win, the work wasn’t worth it. I am here to tell you that that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, we all love a redemption story. Anyone on my team would tell you that we wanted to beat the opposition so badly, as they had knocked us out of the tournament the year before. That would have made for a really nice headline.
You know what I remember though now, three months later? I remember driving to the court that day, dancing in the aisle of the bus with my best friends. I remember one of my teammates playing the piano in the airport when our plane got delayed to California. I can still feel my voice going hoarse from cheering on the court, and the interlocking fingers as we huddled after each point with massive smiles on our faces when things went well, and with stress in our eyes when they didn’t. I remember praying together before that game, as before every game, a mutual awareness in the room that failure was entirely inevitable, in front of a lot of people nonetheless. And yet we went out on the court and played anyway. I remember seeing my parents and brothers in the stands, my blanket of comfort always.
You know what I remember from losing? I remember feeling loved, and being love in return. My team and community gave love in the three weeks of postseason like it was something precious, and thus, we gave it out freely. We were dominant on the court, and yet, our hearts were so soft. We were open to every single moment, to our faith, to the support others poured in, to each other, to miracles. I let go of the outcome, and in result, I opened myself up to everything beyond winning and losing. I have never felt more human in my life, nor have I felt closer to God. I now know just how much we are capable of feeling, of experiencing. I now know the vastness of life that is available to me when I can loosen up my grip on control. I know that we are not empty when we lose. In fact, if we let it, losing can be quite beautiful.