Hay!!!

a thousand shades of green, some sky blue and a splash of red as my neighbour turns his hay. It's perfect hay-making weather today - plenty of sun and a bit of wind.

Yesterday, after reading my memories about sports day, Kendall wrote "no matter where sports days occur, they have a similar militancy about them, and they viciously marginalize all of us who can't compete." However, when I wrote "I've never been competitive" I didn't mean quite that - though I know many, many people who have been badly hurt in the competitions that childhood seems to throw at us constantly. When I say "I've never been competitive" I mean exactly that. Everything that one can win at is somehow quantifiable - fastest person from A to B, highest jump, longest throw, neatest handwriting (or rather, handwriting most like the agreed "neat") best poem (most like agreed best poem), nicest dance, song etc (agreed dance, agreed song, etc). The cleverness of people is measured in exam results and qualifications, success is measured in salaries and column inches....but all that doesn't interest me. I know people who it does interest - some of whom are "successful" and "winners" and they win the prizes. Others would like to win but are bitterly disappointed when they don't (littlest came home sobbing because she didn't get a podium-place at sports day - turns out that she came 5th, which is really good, just not a medal-place - she REALLY cares and is REALLY competitive). But I place my values elsewhere. I'm not saying that to sound superior or virtuous or anything like that, it's just the truth.

The things I like doing and where I measure my success (if I could be bothered to work out a system for measuring the unmeasurable) are unquantifiable....they can be described, pictured, felt but they can't be ranked and numbered, put on a podium and given a medal. Sometimes I think that there are two basic models of human-beings. There are the ones who label things neatly and give scores and know who won what and actually care about it. And then there are those who look at the heap of stuff, moves something a few inches so that the colours look better and then sigh with satisfaction because everything is just so NICE. That's the best way I can think of to describe what I mean by not being competitive - my brain just does not function on those terms.

So, are those who "can't compete" really all that hard done by? Are they not just people who want to win really badly and have difficulty accepting that others are "better" in that particular thing? I couldn't compete on sports day, I've always been about as sporty as a dead stone, but I liked sports day, I liked sitting with my friends, cheering people who were winning or losing, having a go at stuff I knew I was utterly crap at. It was fun. But I never, not for one moment, thought that I would actually win anything. For a while I wondered what it was that the others were doing that made them win medals and then I realised that they were just doing sports well....and that was the point of it.

All through my school life I was exposed to competition of some kind and I didn't do particularly well in any of it - I won no prizes at the annual Eisteddfod, I wasn't picked for teams, my grades were average...the only time I felt totally competitive was when I entered a cheese-making competition (I was about 10, I think) in the same category as my mother, who had won hundreds of prizes, even on a national level, for her cheese. I made the cheese from scratch (milking the goat) and I did my absolute best...and came second to my mother. After a brief moment of utter disappointment, I had to acknowledge that my cheese was slightly lop-sided and that she had won in a fair competition. And then I spent my prize-money on sweets :-))