I busted my ass yesterday for £10 prize. Not a lot of money really. It wasn’t about the money though. It was simply about winning, which surprised me. I’m not by nature a particularly competitive person. Winning has never really meant much to me. Experience yes. Coming out first, not so much. It did strike me though, that winning is itself an experience and not a regular occurrence in my life. Maybe never being good at anything brought me to a state of acceptance that there has to other rewards beyond coming in first.

Yesterday it was about coming in first. Now that it’s done, it seems rather lacking. Not entirely empty, but missing something. I’ve done it, and now what? Collect the ten quid and move on to another experience. Something more satisfying. Certainly there has to be something more than beating another person.

This is boring though. I thought seeing it in print would help sort out the feelings, or rather lack of feelings. It’s just boring, and only the other day I was complaining about banality. Winning is the very apex of banality. Directly below it is writing about winning. I’ll try again because I like money, but you can keep the victory laps.

addendum: the reward yesterday, for me, was a job well done and the knowledge that I had given my all and then some, just as I promised I would do when I took the job. An older, more cynical version of me might have considered that empty, but a grown-up version of me knows that remaining true to one’s word is about as fulfilling an achievement as one could reach.