The More You Head For Your Goal, The Greater Your Chances Of Succeeding!

I didn’t just love Track and Field back in my high school days – I also enjoyed playing netball and watching football games. In fact, I was a member of the netball team, though we didn’t perform as well as we had hoped. Those girls from Vere Technical and Clarendon College knew exactly how to defeat us; they didn’t “skin teeth” with us.

As for football, I enjoyed watching the games, but honestly, I didn’t have much of a choice. I lived on campus, and the school was surrounded by bushes and sugar cane fields. To make myself comfortable, I either watched the games being played on the school grounds or went hiking in the cane fields.

On weekends, I would go to the cane field and help myself to sugar cane. Apart from my dorm mothers, nothing threatened me from going to the cane fields – not the sunshine, not the rain, not even those bouts of pain during that time of the month. I loved sugar cane so much that if eating it made people go mad, I would have been the first to lose my mind!

It’s a pleasure to reminisce about those days at an institution still surrounded by bush,

The good old days when I didn’t even know what it meant to be stuck-up or “stoosh.”

I’m not complaining about my high school surroundings because I grew up in a district with hills, valleys, and bushes – a place where fireflies, or peenie-wallies, lit up the dark nights. They were like tiny lanterns when streetlights were few and far between. I would look forward to the new moon and the full moon. Sometimes the nights were so dark that I acted like a buffoon, looking up at the sky and asking, “Moon, how soon?”

After leaving high school, I still watched football games, but only on TV. Every Sunday afternoon, I tuned in to the English Premier League. After watching many games, I learned a lot, including when a player deserved a red or yellow card. My eyes were always glued to the screen so I wouldn’t miss a second. One observation stood out: those who made more attempts at the goal often scored and sometimes even won the competition. I may not have watched other sports as closely as football, but I believe the same principle applies to life, the more we aim at our goals, the greater our chances of success.

If we are like footballers who are eager to score, then we must keep shooting at our goals. Life’s challenges may attack us along the way, but we should never give up. We must stay focused on achieving our desires. Darren Donnelly says, “When you’re not afraid to fail, your chances of succeeding improve.”

It’s better to lose while trying with all our might than to lose without even putting up a fight