The Blue Sweater

It was the middle of February, and the weather was not conducive for walking outside. I went to a nearby indoor track and planned on walking for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how I felt when I finished the first hour.


I arrived at the gym excited and ready to get my blood flowing, my heart beating, and my legs moving.  Before starting, I diligently did my stretches, and after I was warmed up, I took off my blue wool sweater that I had had for years and laid it on the railing while I went on my walk. 


I had walked 25 laps or so (each lap was 1/10th of a mile) before noticing that my sweater was gone. I assumed someone had stolen it, and I even suspected a young man who had been sitting at a table close to where I had laid it. When I noticed that it was missing, I also realized that the young man had also disappeared, which led to even more speculation about his guilt.


Not wanting to make any kind of assumption or premature accusation I looked over the railing to see if by chance it had fallen onto the bleachers below. It hadn’t, so I walked a few more laps looking more thoroughly around the track, gym, the weight room, and the lost and found, but I never found it.


Finally, I just gave up and assumed that it was lost for good, and I would never see that comfortable sweater again. As I was walking to my car I started to laugh and by the time I reached the car I was laughing so hard that I’m certain that anybody who may have seen me had to think that I was crazy. I was laughing so hard because it was at this time that I remembered something very important about the sweater and I wondered why I spent so much time looking for it.


While I am quite certain that someone took my comfortable sweater, I realized that the person who took it got a big, unexpected surprise. They indeed got a beautiful, comfortable, and warm sweater but what they didn’t expect was the hole in the elbow of the right sleeve. In reality, the sweater I laid on the railing was a very nice sweater to wear to the gym but not much good for anything else.


The lesson I learned from this experience is we often see things which appear to have value, but on closer examination they may lack the value we initially thought they had. This is true not just with material things but in many aspects of life. As we go through life, it can be very valuable to examine our assumptions about the value we expect from our efforts. Do we accurately assess potential rewards and risks, the possible upsides and downsides of the paths we choose? 


Let’s help our children to make the best choices they can, then to always expect the unexpected, learn to roll with the flow and adjust to the challenges they will undoubtedly encounter along the way. Most of all, let’s make the best choices we can and not let life’s unexpected surprises and twists and turns stop any of us, young and old, from moving forward. 



Happy Failing Forward,


Calvert Cazier