Daily writing prompt

Describe one positive change you have made in your life.

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“I stopped warming the bench with my butt, figuratively and literally. Well, seeing how Splizzball’s a summer sport, I guess I was more shading the bench than warming it, but getting off of it was important enough to say I did a good thing for myself.”

[Jo’jaxon is a (former) Splizzball pitcher, and while you may not know all of the rules of the sport I totally made up, you probably have heard of Shoeless Jo’Jaxon. He’s one of the cast of the Also-Rans, and wanted to lend a little star power to this answer.]

“So I never figured on taking a pause on my life’s plan, but evidently life’s plan needed to take a pause on me. You know those “where are they now?” tabloid articles where they always say “so and so was at the top of their game, but then they bottomed out?” Well, there I was, figuring I was at the top of my game, and lo and behold I guess that was as good as I was going to get, because next thing I know, I’m cut from the roster. Was it fair? Hell no. Was there something I coulda done differently about it? Probably, but you know what? All that time I spent kicking myself over my choices didn’t buy me anything anyway. In fact, instead of doing that, I coulda done just about anything else, and maybe had more to show for it.”

“Alright, true confession time. I did mope a lot about it. It was wrong what happened and I did try my best to make it all work out in the end. Still a little sore about it, to be honest. But, I still hold that no matter how right I am and how wrong they were, me being right about it doesn’t change how it all played out. In fact, me being right about it and doing nothing to move forward also didn’t buy me much to look forward to, neither. It took a heart to heart with a stranger to figure that out for myself, and maybe I wasn’t open to the idea until she came along, but sometimes that’s the kick in the butt life needs to give you.”

[What’s he talking about? Why, you can read this exchange!]

“Unless you’re all out of innings, you always got a few more left in you. And I don’t see no scoreboard all lit up telling me when I’m expected to clear the field, so since I don’t know when my game is up, guess I gotta play each inning as they come. Maybe that’s why I needed to get up off the bench and stop feeling sorry for myself, because that wasn’t playing life’s game very well at all.”