Dabbling in Ecclesiastes

It was a typical cross country race day in my high school career one October afternoon. It was overcast and wet and everyone was trying to fight off the slight wintery chill that seemed to have come a bit early. The race was a tune up for our provincial qualifiers in a couple weeks, so everyone was trying to size up the competition from other schools.

My race ran as it usually did. I came in the top half of the field and our top runners seemed to have gotten off to a good start. But when I crossed the finish line and wondered over to the water table a team mate told me something that flipped this ordinary race on its head.

My teammate told me how our best runner hadn't even placed in the top eight or nine (which doesn't sound bad, but it was a big surprise when your top runner has continually placed first or second in every race the last two and a half years). What's more was the lead pack finished about 10 minutes ahead of anyone else! A huge gap in a seven km race.

I thought that was a little suspicious and later I found out that the top eight runners had been disqualified for skipping a whole portion of the race course. I'm pretty sure it was by accident though (there weren't a whole lot of sign markers or marshalls).

Years later I was reading AJ Jacobs' book The Know It All and came across this quote from the Biblical book Ecclesiastes that Jacobs finds interesting, "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong...nor favour to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all"

This paragraph, after I thought about it a bit, reminded me of that race back in high school. The swiftest runner in the race was not the winner and favour was not with the runners with the most skill. Instead, through an unfortunate and lucky set of events these other runners were the winners. At least until they had been found out.

The quote from Ecclesiastes doesn't only fit the literal meaning of the words though. I think what the author was pointing out was that in life even though you may try as hard as you can and be the best at something, not everything is always going to go your way cause things happen that are out of your control.

Jacobs concludes, and I agree, that this quote means we should accept that these things happen and enjoy the goods things in life instead of dwelling on the bad.

On the same track, this quote is saying, it's not what happens in life, but how you deal with it.

Our top runner could have let the frustration and feelings of being cheated get to him in the next race, but he did not and won the provincial qualifiers two weeks later on the same course.

It's like in life. When you get sick and can't go out or complete your work you can sulk and get sicker or you can eat chicken soup, get lots of rest and get better. When you get a harder teacher than everyone else you can complain about it or work extra hard and get those good grades. When you happen to see a movie where Paris Hilton is the main character you can denounce films forever or keep your faith and rent another one.

In the end things are not always going to go as planned because humans can not control everything, so work hard and enjoy the things that are given to you, like that beautiful sunset, those amazing family and friends or those 10 minutes you have before work to run. Maybe one day you'll cross that finish line in first.