Stop and Enjoy the Ride

In my house there is a strict schedule for football on Sundays. My mom and I choose three games we will watch the night before. Then, we go to bed and wake up exactly at 8 a.m. to give us two hours to make breakfast and prepare for the 10 o’clock game.

I love this routine, yet for the first time in my life, I found myself becoming less motivated each Sunday for the past season. By the time the last week of the regular season rolled around, I found myself either watching the games in bed or just failing to watch them at all.

Given my love for the game of football it would take a lot for me to voluntarily miss a game, but I’ll be straight forward … it was a boring year for football. When I say the word ‘boring’, I’m referring to how uneventful and slow the season moved throughout the year.

Football fans were greeted with few to no stories throughout the season. Almost every game went down as predicted, taking the fun out of watching them. Week after week we were met with the same results almost every Sunday: Cowboys win, Patriots win and Browns lose once again.

Many people, including myself, suffered a season long absence of excitement and thrills that we are supposed to get from the NFL, but it didn’t have to be this way.

Yes, the season was a disappointment, but you can’t just sit around waiting for the next one. You choose your approach towards something, whether it is accepting a grade on a test or realizing your loved one moved on … you decide on your next move. While you can sit in your room and pout for hours about a topic you cannot change, you could also think about what to do next. It will take time to accept the results, even if it’s something as silly as a football season.

It is your duty to make sure you rebound the right way, realize you just need to study harder or maybe spend more time with her, but at the end of the day it’s all a matter of perspective.  

I was upset with how the NFL season unraveled this year, but I decided to look to the future and get excited for next year … after all, it will be here before we know it. But one thing I will not do is wish for the beginning of next season, I’m going to try enjoy the long and mysterious ride the offseason is going to offer me, even if it does get boring at times.

The ride to next season, the ride to getting that A+, the ride to get the girl, are all long and strenuous, but if you stop and enjoy the ride it will make the journey that much more exciting.