Failing Gloriously

I spend my days living in my own version of the TV show, The Office, and am often left with lots of spare time at work, unsure of what to do. Right now is one of those moments, in which I was randomly inspired to write, mainly for the sake of Erin, who just mentioned playing tennis.

And when she asked if we play tennis, I had a flashback to my days of “Ghetto Tennis”, which I played with my friend Lindsay on the dark, cool summer evenings in Littleton, CO. That thought prompted a reminder of something else my best friend often says, “If I’m going to win (or succeed), I’ll win gloriously. And if I fail, then I’ll fail gloriously.”

I have come to terms with the fact that I am just mediocre at many things. I was just not born with certain skills, or the drive to perfection in certain areas of my life. But with this realization comes a child-like joy in the fact that if I’m going to be mediocre, I’m going to be gloriously mediocre!

And so as an example, I will relive my days of “Ghetto Tennis.” I believe our motto was, “We don’t got no shoes, we don’t got no keys, we don’t go no skills….we be ghetto.” (and yes, this was coming from 2 middle-upper class suburban white girls of about 18 years old). Lindsay and I were both aware that we just plain sucked at tennis. Some random summer evening, we scrounged up some tennis rackets (who knows where, since I don’t think us or our families really played), a few tennis balls, and got the idea to go attempt to play. Attempt being the key word. And from this mediocre attempt, “Ghetto Tennis” was born.

Ghetto Factor #1: the tennis courts were locked after a certain hour, and we both had keys from around 1990, meaning the locks had been changed. So, depending on the time and our luck, we would either find a court that had been left open, or somehow climb into the court. I forget exactly how it worked, but it was something like that. So basically, we had to break into the courts in order to play.

Ghetto Factor #2: I think after we arrived at the courts (and since no one was around to look at us funny), we just took off our shoes and messed around. We took our stance on either side of the net, and began running around on the dirty court in bare feet. It’s not like either us really hit the ball, or hit it quickly, so there wasn’t much running back and forth to do anyway.

Ghetto Factor #3: Feeding off of the last factor, we really had no skills. We could both serve it over the net at least (probably making up our own technique), and from time to time the other person would actually hit it and send it back over the net. Although I recall several times when Lindsay would hit it to me and it would bounce 2 or 3 times before I actually hit it. Or the best were the classic moves where one of us would swing the racket with all of our might, and completely miss the ball. If I recall correctly, in the midst of this, there was a lot of making fun of each other, jokes about how our thunder thighs were cracking the ground beneath us, and a lot of laughter about how we sucked. Of course, there those rare moments when we would hit it back and forth, maybe 10 times (of course we would count, because it amazed us both), until one of us would eventually mess it up (probably me), and then we’d go back to 1 or 2 hits at best before it flew past our racket, or got caught up in the net.

And after about 15-20 minutes of this, we would both start moving slower, hitting carelessly, and eventually we’d both be sitting down on the court, talking about the latest happenings at school or in our friend’s lives. And so we’d sit for another good 30 minutes or so and just chat and make fun of each other some more, discuss boys, and laugh. And of course, that was when we came up with our slogan: “We ain’t got no keys, we ain’t got no shoes, we ain’t got no skills…we be ghetto.”

So yes, we were both mediocre at best. But we were gloriously mediocre – we made a big joke of it, we laughed at our lack of skill, and we made some dang good memories together. And to me, that’s much more significant than a really good round of tennis.