I noticed it last Sunday afternoon, just as the sun was starting to set.
We were sitting in the stands of a nearby high school football field, watching little T play flag football, his last game of the season. His team was only a few points behind, having just scored a touchdown on their previous drive down the field.
They were playing defense, and T was lined up to guard a kid I could tell was a really good athlete. Sure enough, on the next play the quarterback from the other team threw him the ball, which he caught. And then started running… fast.
From the stands, I could see T try to keep up with him. But the kid who caught the ball had a kind of speed that allowed him to burst into action and take off sprinting, like a blur.
What I noticed next probably only lasted about a second or two; maybe not even that long. As the boy carrying the ball put more distance between himself and T, I could see my little man slow down, bit by bit.
He didn’t give up. He loves being a part of this team; he’s the first to high-five a teammate who does anything good, like making a catch or snatching a flag off an opposing team member’s belt. (That’s a tackle in flag football.)
He even made a huge, field-long catch for a touchdown in his first game. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in sports!… though I’m being a little biased here, I’ll admit 😉
In that moment last Sunday, though, I could see on his face — the other player looked so fast, there was just no way he could catch up to him. I could see the belief drain out of him, even if only for a moment.
You might ask, of course, how could I even know this? The truth is I don’t; not for certain, anyway — though knowing little T as well as I do, it’s a belief I’ve heard him express. And maybe too, it hits close to home because it’s also the way I used to feel when I was his age.
That I couldn’t do what other kids could do athletically, either — that I couldn’t keep up with them, match their pace when we ran laps in P.E. class, or catch them when we played tag as kids.
Why did I believe this? Maybe because another kid had told me I couldn’t, or I didn’t think there was any way I could do things as well as other, more obviously athletically gifted kids could.
Whatever the source or reason, I had made up my mind I wasn’t, couldn’t be good at sports — and I had no idea I’d done that. I wasn’t conscious of it at all, but somewhere in the back of my mind, an idea formed and took root. And I created a narrative that I came to believe, even though I wasn’t aware I had.
Lately, I’ve been reading a book that’s been sitting in the Apple Books app on my iPhone for years, one that obviously intrigued me once, but for some reason I never found reason to read until now: John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.
(It’s a bit of an obscure title, I’ll admit… but I love out-of-the-way, unexpected books like this.)