Facing Tough Competition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlLi0Hrx9QE Don’t some people really upset us?   Though hopefully not incurring the fate of the cyclist, is not our tendency to at worst confront or at best avoid them?   The annoyers--o ur supervisors, co-workers, subordinates, public officials, neighbors, and oftentimes family members.   Admittedly there are those I don’t care for.   Be it a case of different interests, personality differences, religious beliefs, or varying viewpoints, don’t we tend to gravitate towards those with whom we share commonality?    Is our attitude then further reinforced by what we see and hear in our communications media:  argument and disagreement, taunting and belittlement, right vs. wrong, little forethought for reason and compromise?    We each have the ability to shape the thoughts and ideas of only one person and that is ourselves.   Given that, w hat are we doing to shift attitude? Fifty years ago,...

If you have been around young children much you’ll know that one of their first organized athletic activities is soccer.   At the ages of four or five, their attention is centralized.   That is to say that the tendency of the young girls and boys is to gravitate towards the crowd, whatever place on the field has attracted the largest concentration of bodies.   Soccer, at this stage, more resembles a rugby scrum sans the rugged physical contact. Amidst the conglomeration of chaos there always seems to be a kid or two who coyly slips away from the magnetic force of the crowd almost influenced by a sense that causes them to linger or wait.   Occasionally, when the ball squirts out from the scrum the intrepid ones find themselves with an unimpeded path to their opponents goal.   They score!   Even at such a tender age a certain intuition, an indefinable something, begins to have impact.   It was said of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that what made h...