I was there to replace my football studs. And, additionally, I was out to enquire how much Tennis shoes and Running shoes would cost. I was running with my tennis shoes much to the gym instructor’s annoyance. In short, now, I needed 3 new shoes and that meant an emptier wallet.
As always, I had a conversation inside my head between the stingy guy and the more pragmatic one. The stingy guy made a case for just 1 shoe and reminded me that nothing bad had happened for many years. Why worry now? He ignored the fact that I hadn’t been doing any treadmill running prior to this.
The pragmatic guy took a different approach. He beamed in an image of a friend twisting her ankle on the football field thanks to wrong shoes. And he also reminded me of a shopping experience I had had ages ago.
I had gone shopping with a wiser friend before a grass game we had signed up for. He was buying football studs and chose one for himself. He asked me if I had one and I shrugged. I told him that I was happy with my hard court shoes and I’d play with them. In truth, I wasn’t happy at all. I had slipped a fair bit in the previous game but I was a university student then and didn’t have money for 2 sets of football shoes. And he immediately bought me a pair and shared a quote that I had shared on this blog in January 2010 – When you are young, your feet are right but your shoes are wrong. When you get old, your shoes are right but your feet are wrong.
Brilliant. The pragmatic guy won it because he pulled a great chord – I was reminded of something I had preached here. And now, thanks to this blog, I now have as many shoes as many of close (girl) friends.
That aside, I also realized that we are always faced with hidden choices. When we say yes to something, we almost always are saying no to something else. And as we grow, we become more aware of these choices. The flip side is we take less risks and become more cautious with age. While we might have jumped onto a football game with the wrong gear when we were 16, we are likely not to do that when we are 32 and have more at stake. With growth comes responsibility.
I don’t know what to make of this thought yet except that we have to take as many risks as we can while we are young and irresponsible. So, I’ll leave it at that for now – as an observation. Look forward to your thoughts in the comments. :)
A Learning a Day 