“Everyone has ups and downs in life, but we all have the freedom to choose how we respond to a given situation.”
This is the first key to sportsmanship “The Ripken Way” in our Healthy Choices, Healthy Children Coaches Manual. So simple and yet it's not always easy to remember.
While we cannot always change a situation or how other people behave, we can choose how we perceive the world and other people. As I was reminded during our team building with Rachel’s Challenge, if you judge someone based on a single or limited experience, you never know what someone else has dealt with or may be dealing with.
This past weekend, I stumbled across a video created from an excerpt of the commencement speech given by the late, great David Foster Wallace to Kenyon College's Class of 2005. While that was eight years ago, the “capital T truth” here is timeless and something we all need to be reminded of from time to time.