Winning and Losing

As a child, I’d regularly play Monopoly with my sister and brother for hours. I recall the stress. Would I have to pay lots of rent before I passed Go? Was I going to land on Park Lane and Mayfair? Would my little brother run off with all the cash?  Even though we knew that having a slightly bigger pile of pretend currency than our siblings would not make any difference to our lives, we each wanted to win. I wanted to win. The stakes felt high. Yet as we went round and round the board, it looked likely that at least one of us would lose all our money. And losing was so embarrassing.

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Nearly 1400 years ago, in much more life-changing circumstances, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) set out from Medina with his companions, wanting to head for pilgrimage to Mecca. At the border, the Quraysh tribe came to meet Muhammad and his allies to negotiate the terms of his entry to Mecca. They ended up agreeing that all those coming from Madinah would turn back. The Quraysh would not allow them to go on to Mecca that year. Many of Muhammad’s companions were unhappy. Muhammad’s wife, Umm Salma, advised him “people are in shock”. It looked like they had lost.

It is easy to give up hope. But things can change. In the book Muslims turn to for guidance, the Qur’an, over and over again God advises us to have patience. In less than 2 years, the Makkan leadership which had banned Muhammad’s entry to the city, welcomed him as their head.

And while I lost my childhood game, and indeed the one after, I was building up tactics. Sometimes the winning came in the game itself. And sometimes the winning came in losing well, keeping the peace at home.

Nowadays I play a word game with my university-aged son. After many years of me winning hands-down, he is now consistently better than me. He has striven to improve, and he has succeeded. As a parent, I’m so happy with his new-found skills. I have learnt to lose gracefully, comfortable in the knowledge that winning takes many forms.

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