SURE I FINISHED

Dear Spike:

When one of the players on my team made a string of a lazy passes during a scrimmage this week, I let him know (perhaps a bit loudly, as I am prone to do) that I wasn’t happy with his performance.

So when, just minutes later, I made a poor pass that the very same player stole away, he was quick to remind me that everyone makes mistakes.

“Fair enough,” I told him. “I’ll run a few laps after we’re done.”

I’d forgotten about the promise by the end of our practice. Ian had not.

“Don’t you have something you need to be doing?” he asked me with a haughty smile.

“Right,” I said with a sigh. “So how many will it be?”

“Ten.”

“How about one?”

“Seven”

“Three?”

“OK, five — but I’m not going any lower,” he said.

And so I started my run. And with that, Ian jumped into his father’s car and they drove off.

“Well,” I thought as I watched them drive away. “I guess I got out of that.”

Except that, as I slowed my run to a jog, I could see another of my players hiding behind a tree on the far end of the field. He was watching to make sure I finished.

I picked up my pace. By the time I was done with my second lap, Gio’s family had arrived to pick him up.

“Well,” I thought as I watched the second car drive away. “I guess I got out of that.”

Except, when I began to slow again, I found I couldn’t stop.

There are going to be plenty of times in your life when no one is going to know whether you did the right thing or the easy thing. And when no one is looking, the easy thing can be very easy indeed.

It’s likely you’ll take that road a few times. We all do — at work and school, with our families and our friends. We cut corners. We take shortcuts. We stop short.

If Ian and Gio had stayed to watch me run, I would have completed my laps but would have felt indifferent about having done so. It was, in fact, because no one was watching that I finished my fifth lap with a small smile on my face. I even felt a little bit proud of myself.

Most of the time, doing the right thing is a bit more difficult, complicated, painful or arduous than doing the easy thing.

But most of the time, that’s the very thing that makes it worthwhile.

Love,
dad