Thursdays with Woli | Uncertainty

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Uncertainty.

It’s like a pressure sitting on your chest, a grip around the throat, and right now it is as strong as ever.

This week I watched, as I’m sure many of you have, the video ‘Road to the Grey Cup’ that relives the three-game playoff run that made us champions.

I think about my experience on that fateful day, sitting in my hotel room feeling the time pass slowly, my emotions ranging from absolute fearlessness to panic to gratitude and back around in circles.

The desire to win was so great that my mind wouldn’t stop racing until it had an answer to the question that kept pounding in my head, will we win?

Yet, there was no answer.

There was only uncertainty.

The only way to know the outcome was to live it, to play through it, and that seemed like the hardest thing to do when I wanted so badly to know.

I had to accept that I would not know, and that I would have to fight for sixty minutes to find out. I would have to give it my all, knowing that there was a chance that the outcome could be a loss.

The entire province felt it. We lived it.

We fought and we won.

And what became evident is that in order to win, there needs to be an acceptance of this uncertainty. There has to be a trust in the ‘not knowing’,  that win or lose, the outcome is meant for you.

If our team had gone into the game thinking are we going to win instead of focusing on our jobs we would have been slaughtered. We knew we had no control of the outcome, we only had control of how we responded to what we were experiencing in the moment, and only in that space does the outcome reveal itself.

When I found myself standing on the championship stage, holding the trophy, feet dragging through confetti, I had a flashback to three years earlier. I had just been cut from the Vikings. I was un-drafted, unsigned, and working an unfamiliar job as a back-waiter in a French restaurant in Wayzata, Minnesota.

I had no idea what life had in store for me. I didn’t know if I’d ever suit up again.

There was a day when I was helping with the dish crew, picking up some extra work by washing dishes, making choppy conversation in Spanish with the other men.

As I brought clean plates out to the floor I saw Chad Greenway, a Hall of Fame linebacker for the Vikings, sitting at the chef’s table, eating an extravagant meal with his family.

I looked at myself, dirty aproned, tired, hands soggy from the heat of the water. I had never felt so humbled.

As I was about to go back to the kitchen, our owner and head chef, called me over.

He said to me, “I have a brother who lost his job. He’s been down in the dumps, and I told him about you, and how you are here helping out with dish washing.” He paused. “I am not easily inspired, but you have inspired me.”

Those words hit me. They came at a time when I needed them most. Somehow, they led me to believe that I was on the right track, that something good was coming for me.

And that was true.

A month later, I was drafted by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. I had never heard of Winnipeg, couldn’t find it on a map, and on November 24th, 2019, I was holding a trophy in its honour.

In that uncertainty three years before I was made aware of what was certain: I was not done playing, and I had a lot more to give.

That is really the moral of the story. When placed in these times of uncertainty, we have time to think and reflect on what we are certain of.

We are forced back into the moment because that is all we can control, and what comes next we have to trust. We hold the power to respond to any situation, and that is an exceptional power.

In this time of pandemic and panic and absolute uncertainty, we feel like we did before that Grey Cup, wanting to know the outcome, needing to know that we will be winners on the other end of it.

But we can’t know. We can’t have those answers.

But we do have the resolve. That I know is certain.

Let us do what we did on November 24th. Let’s gear up, accept the uncertainty, take care of each other, and experience the moment.

Live in the uncertainty, allowing it to drive us and teach us, because we are not going to be the same when we come out on the other side.

When the buzzer sounds let’s know for certain that we gave our best, that we came out champions, win or loss.

We have been here before.

We have the strength, the power to respond.

Let’s face this uncertainty, together.