The green shirt and sports.

This was my tea yesterday.  After coffee of course and before supper, which is right when tea is the perfect thing to drink.

I may have to add this to the thing at the top of the sidebar so that I am reminded of it each and every day.  Far too often, I rush and hurry and worry and stress and build up such expectations of myself, so much so that I could not possibly live up to it, when really, nature and therefore the true heart of all of mankind, shows that things happen and there is no need to rush.  Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. Lao Tzu

And so it will be with this pretty little thing.  I have made huge strides and yet, it looks exactly the same as it did the last time I posted a picture of it. 

 As I was taking the photo is looked so similar that I just used the older photo.  I am at the really interesting shaping part though and not to give away the clever little secret, I am having a marvelous time doing it.  I have knit about of third of this increase section and in what truly is the oddest thing in my world of knitting, I am eaxctly on stitch count after the exact right number of rows.  

Inconcievable.

But what I really want to talk about this morning is sports.  We watched the Tokyo Olympic opening this morning and it was lovely, well done in a way that I much preferred over the overwhelming glam fest that opening ceremonies so often are. If you are going to spend the money on sprt, spend it on sport and not all the accoutrements.  The sport is the real entertainment so let that shine.

But like everytime I see sports and the huge committment of the athletes, I alway wonder why of all the things people choose to do outside of the workday jobs  and things of their lives, why sport is glorified so much beyond anything.  It came up too earlier in the week, with the 'opening' of Alberta and kids being allowed to play outdoor sports.  Many sports are showing fewer kids enrolling in this mid pandemic season, and the sports people are wondering why.  I could tell them it is because many kids, many adults, many people were exhausted byt the expectation they tried to live up to, that every child would be enrolled in every sport there was outside the home as well as music lessons and dance and the thousands of other things poeple can do just for fun.  Maybe, just maybe, more people saw that rather than rush to be like everyone else, they realized there was a life outside taking kids to sports and stuff and that life coulld happen at home if they choose, that there were things they could do to enjoy life together, without rushing out everyday.   

My thoughts on sports are defined by a lifetime of the things I love to do having no value in the eyes of the world. 

Only librarians and teachers value kids who read.  Parents and the world in general doesn't assign much of a value to it and often chastises the reader for it.  Get your nose out of that book and do something.  How many times I've heard that in my life.   Embroidery?  Knitting?  Spinning?  Sewing? Quilting?  How many times have the things I have chosen to occupy myself with, been called lazy and busy work?  Why does my love of them mean that according to the world I am not worthy enough. 

And why on earth are sports as a thing to do so fundamentally over valued in society? We spend huge amounts of money on them, federally, locally, in families.  Towns, cities, nations build entire arenas to play them in, dozens of soccer fileds, basketball courts, curling rinks, hockey palaces.  People doing the sports are lauded as heros of the nation.

I was awful at sports.  My feet and my body don't coordinate with my hands.  I am clumsy and not at all graceful, and more than a little myopic as well as the other stuff that has come on as I get older. I liked walking.  I loved biking.   I understand the feeling of doing a physical thing just so, but there was never any thrill in it.  To me, it was all just a way to be embarassed publically, in front of all the kids in school, for the teacher to always be calling me out or pointing out all the ways, I wasn't doing it right, or even calling me out the one time I physically meshed, and did it right.  Praise can be very negative.

But, give me two needles and I an make magic happen.  Give me a thread and some fine cloths and a silver needle and I can make timeless works of wonder.  Give that little girl me a book and I shine.   Give me a needle and thread and I can create.  Give me fibre and a wheel and I can make.

All those things in the world did not make me hate sports.  Not at all.  I love watching and enjoy the competiton.  I love the strategy and the sheer brute strength of them.  What it did make me hate, and abhor is the glorification of sport, the 'pro' sport idea that these athletes are something special in the world, that they are deserving of big bucks for what is just another way of entertaining someone as well as themselves.  

They might have a special skill, but so do I.  And I find myself demanding more people acknowledge that what I do, is just as much of a special skill and adds much more to the world in the long run than some ulitimately dumb game.  

I am certainly demanding more for the little kids who are good at things beyond sports.    It is time that society appreciate and laud much more than sport.