If you are a sports fan, this is the time of the year that you absolutely live for: We have the NHL and NBA playoffs, which unfortunately neither my beloved Leafs nor Raptors will be participating 
Baseball season is just starting, which means my fav Blue Jays have not been eliminated from contention…yet. Just about every night there is a “big game” on TV somewhere.
Sports is about winning and losing. Same goes for life. I’ve lived long enough to have experienced a good dose of both. Having grown up playing sports, I used to hate losing as much as I loved winning. But as I look back on my life now, I realize that it is losing, rather than winning that has shaped me as a person and moved me towards my life goal: to be a better person than I was yesterday. Here are a few ways that losing has been good for me…
(1) While winning generally encourage us to keep doing the same thing over and over (First Golden Rule in basefall: “DON’T F*#K with a winning streak!”), losing forces us to change.
(2) Winning reinforces self-illusion, until there is nothing more to us than an image. Losing strip away layers of facade to get to the core of who we are.
(3) Winning breeds hoarding: we keep stockpiling spoils of our victories. Losing takes things away to help us see what is truly our own, that which no one can take from us.
(4) Winning tempts us to love to have more “things” around us and use people to help us get more of it. Losing teaches us to let go of “things” and love people we have instead.
(5) Winning puts people on different steps of a “ladder”: league standings, scoring races, social classes, etc. Losing help us realize that we are all the same, thus creating that beautiful thing call a “community”.
and finally, this is a big one for me:
Winning leaves us with fear…afraid of the day we stop winning, dreading the notion of falling off the top, making us desperate to hang on to every margin for victory. Losing, on the other hand, takes away all but leaves us with hope: In the darkest of nights, straining our eyes to the horizon for the slightest hint of light, longing for morning to bring an end to the pain.
Bottom line: Winning is not everything people make it out to be, and losing is not half as bad as we may think.
Go Leafs Go!!!! Go Leafs Go!!!!
(see what I said about losing teaching us to hope? 
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