Jelly Pickle!

  Trying is what counts.  Try your best and good things happen.  If you never try, you never know what you might become.  People constantly try things these days, big things, hopes, dreams.  There’s nothing wrong with trying to reach them, trying.  That’s what we tell ourselves.

  Sometimes, though, trying is all we do.  Trying becomes a habit, when almost everything we do is just done on the side, something we’re trying but not really caring for.  At what point do we really pick something to stick to, to fully commit to? Do we ever?

  I used to believe in trying.  Maybe I still do.  Perhaps I was deluded or naive, but I used to believe you should try as much as you could, go out and explore possibilities, something as cliche as experiencing everything in the world, as much as you could anyways.  That is fine actually; to be honest, I still think it’s a good thing - if we gave at least half a thought to what we were trying and perhaps just as much care in doing it.

  A friend once asked me to enter a national contest, to compete together as partners.  For three months, we worked day and night.  We were determined, nothing less than first place.  If we won this tournament, we’d compete at a international level.  There was no reason why we couldn’t.  We had the skill, and we had the effort, the drive to win.

  The day of the tournament, I discovered my partner actually had little to no work done.  While I had stayed up the entire previous night practicing, he hadn’t looked at our design since last week.  But with a sly smile, my partner told me nonetheless that we’d surely win because, as my partner put it, we had “given it all we got and nothing less.”

  That evening, we lost horribly, didn’t even rank top ten.  And this wasn’t even among our state, let alone among the nation.  My partner was questionably frustrated, claiming he tried ”tried so hard only to have gotten nothing.”  He suggested that maybe we just weren’t good enough.

  Were we incompetent? I didn’t think so, and I didn’t think he thought so either.  The very next year, we entered the same contest; my partner was driven, motivated.  We were going to win this time - that’s what I said anyways.  My partner boasted we didn’t try that hard last year and that this year we would go all out.  I’m not sure what he meant by that comment, but I made certain that year to keep him on track with our design layout.  We would not compete unprepared again.

  We didn’t get anywhere close to the top rankings nationwide that year.  However, we ranked high locally.  Apparently, my partner never made arrangements to come with me to the state division, and without a partner, I could not compete.  My partner stated later he was ”so surprised we actually won” at the first level, expecting more that we’d lose pitifully.  Because the “chance of not winning” was so great, my partner thought it reasonable to eliminate the possibility of competing higher up.

  The next year, my partner came back again to ask whether I wanted to compete.  I was hesitant.  I couldn’t help it.  My partner scolded me that I musn’t pass opportunities like this; he claimed if I never try things out, I’d never know what I was capable of.  I had to wonder, and I did ask my partner, whether or not we intended to make it past the national level.  Why bother with all this effort if we did not intend to go as far as we could? My partner responded simply that even if we were not going to showing up for the upper level divisions (my partner didn’t want to miss school), we should compete nonetheless.  It’s the experience that counts, the effort we put in.

  “And this time,” my partner proclaimed proudly, “we’d give it everything we got.”