What a great game! What a great win! The Leafs bent but did not break and managed to give the Winnipeg Jets their first loss of the season. What a great feeling. So now what?

I think this is the lesson that the Leafs are teaching me at this time. Success and failure are not singular moments isolated from each other. Moving on from both requires exactly the same emotional mechanism. That’s the secret that I needed to learn. It’s an emotional thing, feelings are for feeling right. So right now the Leafs feel good but the only way to keep that feeling going is to win the next one.

There’s no guarantee that they will win the next one. All they can do is prepare and show up. After that it’s up to the collective will of the universe. That’s not a very comfortable notion is it. I think we all want to exist in a world where once we accomplish a thing we don’t have to do it anymore, or at least it’s not a struggle. Sorry, pumpkin, that’s not how it goes.

So the Leafs play again tomorrow and maybe they play like heroes, maybe they don’t. We all get to find out together what story is being told.

I mentioned last time that I wasn’t sure if I would watch Leafs v. Jets. I ended up watching the first two periods then switched to a different show for the third. I did that to protect my peace and it worked. That doesn’t mean the same tactic will work for me next game.

Like the Leafs I need to prepare myself for the experiences I expect and then show up. That’s all I can control. And even preparation seems like a lofty goal. We can’t predict every possible outcome for every possible scenario. How exhausting. For me it comes to trusting myself and loving myself. Right now that seems like something I can manage. That’s pretty cool.

I Be Leaf