Trajectories

There are always going to be days like this.

I showed up for my first work meeting across town at 10 am, only to discover it was scheduled to begin at 11 am. My youngest son showed up for his piano lesson at 3 pm, only to discover it had been scheduled for 2 pm. His slightly older brother and I showed up for his doctor's appointment at 4 pm, only to discover it had been scheduled for 4 pm yesterday.

All we could do was laugh. Pretty much everything that could have been screwed up today got screwed up. It doesn't matter who made the errors -- this kind of thing happens. At the end of it all, no harm done.

Not that anyone reading this will care, or even know why they should care, but my fantasy baseball team is failing after an unprecedented run in first place in a fourteen-team league.

The past two weeks have seen my team's collapse, which, I'm sad to say, has removed a certain portion of joy from my life.

To compete in fantasy sports, you have to have some confidence in your ability in math, statistics, as well as in the nuances of the sport itself. When it comes to baseball, I think I may know a thing or two.

I've played it, coached it, written about it, and watched a ton of it.

This year, for the first time ever, my team, called the Mud Lake Mafia, has dominated the league week after week for months. Now, we are on the verge of falling into second place.

That makes me sad.

In the real world, however, one of my sons and I watched our Giants win a big game tonight in their quest to return to the playoffs as they did two years ago, in the summer and fall of 2012.

Nothing binds a city together like a sports team's success. And many of us in San Francisco love the Giants -- they are an especially loveable group. They face a rough path to getting there by early October, but if they do, tonight's game will have been one of the key moments in their journey.

***

Journeys. Far afield from sports, we all are on journeys. Every single one of us is progressing in one way or another.

The key is being able to recognize which of the many possible trajectories our lives might take we are on at the moment. Which vector? And how can we adjust out own personal algorithm to achieve the desired results?

Assuming we know what we presently want, but that is an entirely other discussion altogether.

-30-