For as long as I could remember, my answer to this question was, “Play baseball.” I’d grown up playing baseball since I was about five years old, and played every spring – fall up until college. When college came and I got caught up in other things, I turned my attention to softball. I’d never truly made a full effort to try to play in college as I’d grown tired of how sports had become more of a job than a game to be enjoyed. It’s possible I could have made a division 3 college team, but coupled with the fact I knew I wasn’t going to be a baseball player and I was content letting my career come to an end. So at about 18, I switched to recreational leagues and softball.
Church softball games were big, and then when I moved to Washington, DC in summer of 2006, I tried to play as much softball as possible. DC has a ton of young professionals and hosts everything from softball to kickball to cornhole. At one point, my next effort to challenge myself consisted of a legitimate effort to play softball every day of the week. I’d say I mostly succeeded, as over one summer I played for six different teams, (On the 7th day God rested, after all.) If you were to ask me point blank, “Steve, if you could do one thing, every day, for the rest of your life… what would it be?” My answer would be clear, “Play baseball or softball.”)
I had always liked this picture. From what I remember… One year I had been out of town for a few months over the summer and had missed nearly all of the softball season. I had just gotten back into town and was ecstatic to get back into the swing of things. One of my teammates commented, “Wow Steve, you haven’t stopped smiling since you got here.” I agreed, made a face, and a picture was taken. And there you have it.
What makes me like this picture even more now, is that during my work in politics one year, one of the political bloggers who disliked me and pretty much disliked everything about principled individuals, used this picture in a hit piece about me. I suppose the purpose was to try to find a goofy or unflattering picture to use for his blog post, which is funny by itself that any blogger would spend time writing about me and posting pictures of me in a baseball uniform. But the joke was on him. I actually loved this picture and love it even more now. I mean I’m playing softball, and smiling like a cheshire cat! Come on people, look how happy I am!
My answer to the “What would you do” question remained the same until the summer of 2012, when I came across Crossfit. I’ve posted about Crossfit here, and I’ll have many more posts on it I’m sure, but when I started “full-time” so to speak, my desire shifted from softball to Crossfit. No longer did I want to play in multiple softball leagues. Instead I wanted to do Crossfit everyday. I’d turn down invitations to play softball because I had a Crossfit workout that day. Or I’d refrain from joining another league because I didn’t want to be sore and hamper my Crossfit performance. If you were to ask me this same question now, my answer would be, “Crossfit.”
The way I feel about Crossfit now is the way that I felt when I was in six different softball leagues a few years ago. The point is my interests have changed, and the ways that I challenged myself have shifted and evolved. It’s important to continue to challenge yourself and seek out new and exciting activities and adventures that keep you motivated. Ask yourself right now, “If I could do one thing, everyday, for the rest of my life, what would it be?” Then write it down, and ask yourself the same question a year from now. When something loses its flair, don’t just sit there, find the next thing that gets you motivated and do it.
If you could do one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? How would you spend your time? How has that thinking changed in your life?
