It's been months since I blogged last and I don't really know why to be honest. If you asked me what I've done for the last 2 months I would respond with, "I lived it." I haven't done anything special besides my job, meeting new people, learning as much as I can, and enjoying my stay here. After a while, this is the same as home. I have good friends, great opportunities to change people's lives, fantastic living conditions, and I'm in a great place mentally. I'm starting to miss friendships that I have stateside but I'm really embracing the new ones I've made over the last 5 months. I really do love this place and these people, I find it saddening that our relationship with a country like this has not been the best, from an American standpoint. Everyday I have more and more people refusing to speak to me in English because they assume I'm Serbian, and I get less he's-definitely-not-from-here stares.
My language has changed quite a bit as a whole, my English is slipping, I can't remember Spanish to save my life, and I find that I would rather speak Serbian with my teammates than English. Some of my enunciation's are in a more Southern Serbian tongue and some are more Northern sounding, and like any foreigner I have words that scream, "Dude, I'm trying my best." It's a funny comparison from past to present, when Randy and I first arrived here in Nis we would sometimes respond to people who spoke Serbian (gibberish to our ears) with "Sí". A flawless example of how humans are creatures of habit and our extremely comprehensive thought process: I didn't understand anything this person just yelled at me, ummm ummmmm say something.... anything..... "¡Sí!"
The longer I'm here, the harder understanding a standard desk job in the real world becomes. I was watching Office Space not too long ago and had an epiphany, similar to Peter's. No matter what, you're asked to produce like everyone else, display no special skills, conform to the rules and regulations, and you're accoladed for consistently achieving the status quo. In my life, I'm a teacher, a role model, a teammate, a brother, I'm awarded for discovering and overcoming, and most importantly I have the opportunity to shine.
I laugh every time I think about it. What is a job? A job is ANYTHING that people will pay you to do. The older I get the more hilarious I find the thought; after college, graduates are petrified to not find a job that they don't want in the first place. I've been told quite a bit by older people who really love what they do that if you wake up every day and say, "They pay me to do this?", that means you're in the right job. I run around with plastic protection all over my body, throwing myself into other men as hard as I possibly can for an hour. I do that 8 times throughout a 5 month period along with practice with my best friends, I make appearances at pool openings and on TV, I go to meetings with my friends, etc, and outside of that I have all that time in-between to do anything I want.
It's easy for people to sit and watch these young athletes struggle with the spotlight on them when they don't even have a fragment of an idea of what it's like for these young people to get millions of dollars thrown in their face for playing a game that they've played since they were a child. I'm not making millions by any means but the more experience I get with this lifestyle, the closer I get to seeing what they're going through.
I laugh every time I think about it. What is a job? A job is ANYTHING that people will pay you to do. The older I get the more hilarious I find the thought; after college, graduates are petrified to not find a job that they don't want in the first place. I've been told quite a bit by older people who really love what they do that if you wake up every day and say, "They pay me to do this?", that means you're in the right job. I run around with plastic protection all over my body, throwing myself into other men as hard as I possibly can for an hour. I do that 8 times throughout a 5 month period along with practice with my best friends, I make appearances at pool openings and on TV, I go to meetings with my friends, etc, and outside of that I have all that time in-between to do anything I want.
It's easy for people to sit and watch these young athletes struggle with the spotlight on them when they don't even have a fragment of an idea of what it's like for these young people to get millions of dollars thrown in their face for playing a game that they've played since they were a child. I'm not making millions by any means but the more experience I get with this lifestyle, the closer I get to seeing what they're going through.
"You're one of the best in the world at holding this leather thing, running with it, and not falling down when people try to push you on the ground. So, here's 10 million dollars, you're 22 years old, we have no idea what your life has been like up to this point, you're going to be surrounded with people that you've never known before in places that you've never been. We expect you to make only great decisions. Good luck, try not to mess it up."
Yea, we all know the famous Spiderman quote, "With great power, comes great responsibility". What if the person has no idea what responsibility is? This person is so great at doing things that involve that piece of air filled leather, that no one wants to guide them or punish them in order to educate them on life lessons. Instead, since they are so well respected on the field or court that it transitions to life off the field. His parents stop disciplining him, because he's doing "so well", his teachers laugh when they catch him cheating on a test, but don't fail him, his friends tell him he's invincible and he's going to make it big, yet they want him to skip training tomorrow morning and come out with them tonight for the best party of the year. With such high expectations for that person to do everything perfectly and be successful, why wouldn't they consider life as a normal person that nobody has an opinion about?
Being a product of your surroundings is inevitable. If you hangout with people who don't want to push you than it will be difficult to support your "limitless potential lifestyle" by self-motivation. When I was training with my team in college all I wanted to hear was that my coach didn't hate me. As bad as that sounds, if a person is always criticizing you to improve and is never satisfied with the results when a best effort is given, in-turn the criticized has a feeling of insignificance. There is a fine line between making someone feel uncomfortable with their accomplishments to this point and making that same person think that they can never attain their goals. The best motivators in the world tiptoe along this thin line.
Right now our team is sitting at 7-0, we travel to Indjija tomorrow to play for the conference championship, a perfect season, the Super-league and opportunity to play for the Euro Cup next season awaits. If I execute my job with perfection and exceed the expectations that people have for me, we go undefeated and I can finally earn that feeling of accomplishment and closure. If we lose, we go 7-1, don't go to the Super-League next season, don't get to play for the Euro Cup and I get the empty feeling that I didn't do enough. I didn't go hard enough, I didn't live how I wanted, I let my teammates down, and I return home a loser wondering what the feeling of success would've been like.
Here's to the pursuit of perfection while knowing that I'm doing it for the man next to me and the other 9 men sharing the field with us. Here's to the struggles. Here's to the triumphs. Here's to life.
-One Life
Right now our team is sitting at 7-0, we travel to Indjija tomorrow to play for the conference championship, a perfect season, the Super-league and opportunity to play for the Euro Cup next season awaits. If I execute my job with perfection and exceed the expectations that people have for me, we go undefeated and I can finally earn that feeling of accomplishment and closure. If we lose, we go 7-1, don't go to the Super-League next season, don't get to play for the Euro Cup and I get the empty feeling that I didn't do enough. I didn't go hard enough, I didn't live how I wanted, I let my teammates down, and I return home a loser wondering what the feeling of success would've been like.
Here's to the pursuit of perfection while knowing that I'm doing it for the man next to me and the other 9 men sharing the field with us. Here's to the struggles. Here's to the triumphs. Here's to life.
-One Life
