Team (May 23)

Sports provide us with a great example for the way life seems like it should work. Not just any sports, but team sports specifically. A team is made up of several individuals that realize that they cannot accomplish the given task without the help of the other around them. For a team to win a game there needs to be several different things happening. First the individual members need to know what they are good at. There are certain points in a game when you will be asked to do something that you are not the best at, but if you know what you are good at you will not attempt to do too much in the other situations and hopefully you will find yourself in situations where you are able to step up and do what you are best at to the best of your ability. Second, each player needs to find themselves in the role that they have been asked to play. It is kind of like the body in general, where we do not ask our own eyes to also smell in addition to seeing. Third, and potentially most important, each part of the team needs to be able to communicate so each member can do their job in conjunction with the rest of the team within the established system. Without communication the parts will not work together as well as they were designed to do. In a world today where we see individuals in professional sports seeking bigger contracts and focusing more and more on the self it becomes more and more apparent how important it is for the individual to sacrifice for the greater good of the team. Now if only the world would have fewer of those individuals who only look out for themselves and more of those who realize that we as the human race are here as a team, in conjunction with everything else that lives on this planet.