Day Twenty: Picking my Bracket

When I think about basketball, (which I try not to do often!), my mind takes me back to my terrible tweens...  In fifth grade I was living in a suburb of Boston, MA, in the same house my parents had lived in before I was born.  Many of my friends had been classmates since preschool and I was very comfortable in my little, familiar world.   While my family almost never watched sports, I had taken an interest in basketball, as I was one of the better female players in my gym class, and I decided that I would play for the sixth grade team the following year.  

And then, everything in my life changed...  Fast forward to sixth grade, and my family had moved to a rural town in New Hampshire where I knew absolutely no one.  To make matters more complicated, sixth grade was the year that the seven local towns combined their students to create one regional middle school.  As a result, I was awarded none of the "new girl" privileges that most people experience when they move.  At first, nobody reached out to me as everyone just assumed that I was from a different town than the one that they lived in! And my tendency towards introversion did not help matters one bit!

Although we moved up to New Hampshire an intact family, that year my parents decided to get a divorce.  And, in addition to all of the difficult transitions I just mentioned, I also had the normal angst of a typical tween.  Needless to say, I went from being a very self confident ten year-old to a shy and timid eleven year-old.  (Despite the specifics of my situation, this phenomenon is anything but unique.  I highly recommend Mary Pipher's wonderful book, Reviving Ophelia to anyone who is or will be interacting with a tween girl!)  

In my previous life, I had been very active in a variety of extracurricular activities and one of the major disappointments of this move was that most of those activities did not seem to be offered where I was now living.  However, playing for the sixth grade basketball team was still an option, so despite reservations I signed up to play.  And, whether it was due to the gangly growth spurt I had just gone through or the huge hit to my self-confidence that I had just taken, quite frankly, I sucked.  While there were good people on the team and there were some good times that I remember, I pretty much hated every minute of it...  

As the years passed, I made some wonderful life-long friends, (a number of whom I befriended that very difficult year), and eventually adjusted to my new environment.  However, I still think of sixth grade as one of the most challenging periods in my life.  In some ways, my experience with sixth grade basketball has come to represent that incredibly difficult time and my challenges with fitting in at my new school.  Perhaps, that is why of all the televised sports I am the least drawn to watching basketball.  

Fast forward to today and, ironically enough, my best friend was the co-captain of her high school varsity basketball team.  She regularly plays basketball informally with friends when the weather permits and follows, (at least moderately), professional, college and even high school basketball every year.  In fact, her high school team just won the state championship this year and she made a point of watching the game on television despite being at our cheesecake gathering!  While she and I have many shared opinions, a shared career, and multiple shared interests and activities, this is probably one of the major differences between us.  While her experience with basketball built up her self-confidence and defined who she is today, mine had exactly the opposite impact!

So when I was looking for a novel experience for today and she suggested that I choose a bracket on Yahoo Sports, I was hesitant.  I was not going to be following the games and it just seemed kind of pointless and boring.  However, then she told me that if I chose all of the winning teams for each of the college basketball games I would win a million dollars.  A chance to stay on maternity leave forever and not go back to work in a few weeks?  Sign me up!  So, with absolutely ZERO knowledge of any of the teams, I picked a bracket based solely on intuition and (my lack of) psychic ability!  

I'm not feeling overly hopeful or optimistic about my chances of becoming a millionaire, but this experience was certainly novel... and surprisingly fun. Part of the point of this experiment is to see how opening one's self up to novel experiences could impact a person's life and sense of well being.  I think as I've gotten older, I've become more set in my ways and less likely to take chances and stray from my well established norms.  Opinions about my skills and interests that formed decades ago have petrified into personal "truths" without ever being revisited or examined.  However is it fair or smart of me to let my experiences as an eleven year-old dictate how I feel more than twenty years later about a game I once actually liked? 

Committing to experiencing something novel every day for a year makes it nearly impossible to live within my comfort zone.  However, I'm beginning to wonder if my "comfort zone" might have become more like a barrier that shields me from the things I tell myself I don't like or can't handle.  While I'm sure the barrier protects me in some ways, isn't it possible that it also keeps me from experiencing life to the fullest?  Perhaps, one benefit of creating novelty in one's life is that it allows a person's comfort zone to be continually expanding.  I don't think that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find that I'm a basketball fanatic, but I do think I'll keep an eye on how my bracket is doing.  And the next time my best friend wants me to watch a game with her, or even (deep breath), play a game with her, I might just join in!