Life is an “Any Given Sunday” Game

Life is an "Any Given Sunday" Game
 
Last night, we rewatched the Oliver Stone classic football movie "Any Given Sunday" with Al Pacino, and something struck me about life, as it did the first time I saw the movie.
 
Life is an "any given Sunday" game.
 
We think we know what is going to happen, and we never do.
 
Now that fall is in full swing, football has come back to my house. I love hearing the sound of it floating up from the basement as the weather gets cooler. I love how passionate my husband and son get about who is favoured this year, the different match-ups, who of the beloved players are on which teams. Especially at Thanksgiving (this past weekend), there is much ado about football around here.
 
In American football (as opposed to soccer or football elsewhere), the phrase "Any Given Sunday" refers to the fact that while there is a massive amount of chatter, betting, hoping, wishing, sports pundits punditizing, and general thinking going into the outcome of each game, come Sunday night - when most games are played - anyone can win.
 
We don't know what will happen.
 
The underdog can go up against the mighty powerhouse and win. A strong team can have a series of unfortunate plays or injuries (or both) and go down fighting. The game is played in every inch (as Al Pacino's character illuminates in a famous speech) and you never really know the outcome until the final second. 
 
Why do I say that life is an "any given Sunday" game?
 
Because we, all the time, have a million opinions about what should happen, what will happen, what happened yesterday, what happened in the longer past and what it means about the future. We think, think, think about our next inch and until we live it, we don't know. The next inch of life is unwritten. Literally.
 
Our brain is really good at stitching together snapshots of the past to create a linear feeling of what happened and then projects it out into the future as certainty and stability.
 
The truth is far wilder than anything we could guess.
 
We selectively remember fragments of what happened, mix in some aspects we make up to fill in the gaps, add a dose of "getting real", and then we decide things about ourselves and our abilities to perform that have nothing to do with our potential or actual possibilities in life.
 
I notice myself believing certain things about my ability or inability to do almost anything that I've clearly made up along the way somewhere but isn't actually true. It feels (or until now felt) really true. It feels reasonable. Being realistic.
 
But the truth is, anything can happen. And does.
 
We live, marvelously, in an unknown question.
 
Each moment, the possibilities are infinite.
 
We aren't actually afraid of what we don't know or the unknown. We are afraid of what we make up will happen.
 
The need to control or the need for certainty keeps people small. It also only makes sense if you start by making up a limited future that hasn't happened yet.
 
The experiment for the week, if you so choose, is to recognize that in the next inch of your life (the next moment) you don't know what will happen. Even if you can guess with a pretty high accuracy, you don't actually know. Don't pre-decide that the outcome is already decided.
 
In that inch, everything is up for grabs. It's magic. You can be anything. You can do anything. Something amazing might come through you if you stay open to the enlivening energy of the present moment.
 
You might do a backflip, catch the ball in the endzone and score a touchdown.
 
Reply and let me know how this went for you.
 
With Love, 

Sara Joy
 

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