On our registration form, we ask the question: Have you done competitive sport? It's one of the characteristics we like to know with new people that might give us more understanding of how we can actually help people to develop and practice. E.g. I was a swimmer, very highly competitive, I would train for two hours a day. And to train for two hours a day it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of effort. You need to really push, and you get bored easily, it's just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the pool. So boredom can set in, but you push, you have to have an idea of where you are going. You want to win the race, you want to make a faster swimming time, and so on.
So when a person has that sort of background like me, it means that in a retreat they can work harder, especially during the afternoon which is four hours and fifteen minutes long. For new people, it can be a pain. But when they've done competitive sport at a high level like I have, they push through that a lot easier. So competition itself can sometimes aid us in this practice. For most kids, in fact, probably for every kid, I would recommend having them compete in some way because it gets them ready for life.
Life is full of ups and downs, life is full of winning and losing, life is full of it. Can we learn to win, but win graciously as they say? Can we learn to lose, and lose with dignity as they say? Can we understand how to compete in a way that is not really the issue of winning and losing, but it really is how we play the game? It's really the competition itself that helps teach us certain values, gives us certain conditioning that can actually help us in our life, especially in the Dhamma practice.
Some sports are better than others. Swimming in particular has a quality to it that is different to many other sports, with regards to time. It's not just a matter of winning or losing. There is an element of "Did I do my best time?" For me if I won a race, but my time was not my best time, it was okay, I won. But I actually wasn't that happy. If I lost a race but I did my best time ever, wow, great, I was thrilled. So the winning against the other people was not the primary thing. The winning against myself was the primary thing.
"Winning", trying to improve yourself, trying to increase your generosity, trying to increase your compassion/lovingkindness, trying to increase all the good qualities, that type of competing against yourself, gets super valuable in this practice.
And sometimes it's acutally better to lose, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Bring that into your losses, whenever you have a loss bring up the Good luck, bad luck story, it is so valuable.
If it wasn't for a huge loss that I experienced when I was 24 - a huge loss. If it wasn't for that huge loss, I wouldn't be here. Ah, wasn't that good luck? I think it was. Because what I lost was trying to build an indoor swimming pool with me as the swimming coach, trying to become someone famous, my own pool, my own squad, I'd be an Olympic coach by now, I'd be famous the world over.
At that time, to me it was "bad luck". And it actually happened to a friend of mine. He was another coach, and he got a similar job that I could have had, but I didn't quite get it at that time, so I lost out on that, too. He has one of the top ten swimming squads in the United Statess, last time I heard. He has some kids going to the Olympics, he's famous.
That might have been me.
Would you guys rather that I am a swimming coach?
So when we lose something, in your normal life, you don't know, this might be best thing that's ever going to happen to you.