Winning Is Not Assured

We all want victory. We all want a guarantee what we do will pay off in the future. We all want to know, at the very least, things will be all right in the future. The reality of our life shows us winning is not assured. In our life on earth, we can and do taste defeat. The causes of our defeats are many just as the causes of our victories are many. Although winning is not assured in every circumstance, we can still win out over whatever adversity or circumstances we face in life. You may lose everything and everyone. However, even in this instance, you can win out by not giving in and not giving up. Our greed, our lust, and our selfishness corrupt our ideas of what it means to win. If we think of winning as winning a prize without much of an effort on our part, we end up being losers because we have not put forth much effort. Winning in life, even if we have lost everything and everyone, requires effort on our part. Just because you may be in grief over a loss in any area of life, being in grief does not mean your grief will guarantee you a win in the future. You may feel bad about losing. However, feeling bad about losing does not mean you will win in the future or deserve to win in the future. To win out over circumstances requires we continually work toward our goals and objectives. If our goals and objectives have been taken from us, we must find new goals and objectives. True victory in life is not about conquering another person. If we think of victory as conquering another person, we end up losing in the end because we are all supposed to empower others and make them better. Even in special circumstances like stopping criminal behavior, we are trying to make the life better for a potential victim as well as the criminal. If we think of winning as being way ahead of everyone else or outscoring them, we eventually end up losing, because of the factors of our achieving victory change or we change. No one can win in this life forever if we measure our wins and losses like we are scoring points in a game. The greatest contributor to a winning life, or at least to winning streaks in life, is how we handle the winning and how we handle the losing. If winning and losing make us better, we win even if we lose. If winning and losing make us bitter or destructive, we lose whether we have won or lost. One of the greatest challenges of our life is not to defeat others. One of the greatest challenges in our life is to defeat the darkness or inner opponent within us. When we defeat the inner opponent within ourselves, we are assured of winning out over every circumstance.