Slim to None

Listening to the final chapters of The Boys in the Boat, I’ve gotten to the gold medal Olympic race.  And even though I know the outcome, it is quite dramatic.  The 1936 Berlin Olympics were used by Hitler and the Nazis to unveil to the world the new, beautiful, cosmopolitan Germany, reconstructed and ready to take its rightful leadership position among the nations of Europe under the Third Reich.  Crew, at that time, was the second most popular sport in the Olympics and one in which Germany had invested heavily in order to showcase the supremacy of the Aryan race.  In fact, Germany swept most of the crew races on the final medal day at the event, leading up to the most important race, the eight man shell.

The children of lumberjacks, fisherman and working class folks, the US team (comprised entirely of University of Washington college students) had barely been outside of Washington state, let along abroad in Europe.  They had never performed in front of anything like the crowd of 75,000 Germans, including Hitler and his high command, all demonstrating their loyalty to the Nazis by chanting “Deutschland” non-stop.  If that wasn’t bad enough, the US team suffered from several huge disadvantages on the big day.  The stroke oarsman (the guy who sets the pace that the entire team follows) had been deathly ill since arriving in German and was barely able to sit upright.  Through a Byzantine and likely biased lane assignment protocol, they got the absolute worst assignment while the Germans got the best, creating a disadvantage equal to almost two boat lengths due to the wind and waves in their lane.

In short, their chances for winning were slim to none.

Although I know how this one ends, it made me think.  Sometimes our chances are, as the saying goes,  slim to none … and Slim’s out of town.  But we still have to show up.  We still have to put one foot in front of the other.  We trudge on. Maybe things will work out, maybe they won’t.  But what’s in front of us is what we must do.  Get up, get dressed, take care of whatever you’ve got to take care of.  This is the business of life.  Face whatever is in front of you as best you can.  Today, I awoke feeling a little down and like things just weren’t going my way.  Sometimes that’s how I feel.  Thank God that’s not the end of the story.

Miraculously, when I manage to put one foot in front of the other, I always feel better.  A tiny bit of action helps get me unstuck and enables me to move past my self-limiting thoughts.  Wishing things were different doesn’t make them so. The only way to get past it is usually to get through it, even when our chances look slim to none.  After all, slim’s better than nothing.

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