Life According To Yogi....

This post was the result of a conversation at dinner last night. Somehow, we got to talking about Yogi Berra. We mentioned a few of his more famous quotations and I said, that I bet, if I looked up some more, I could write a post on them. Well here goes...

1. "It ain't over, til it's over." This has to be his most famous quotation. I wonder how often he has been proven right. It is for all those people who give up in the 8th inning and leave the park - analogous to giving up on life and deciding that it's not going to get any better.

Don't leave! Hang in there until the bitter end. Things could and have changed at the last moment. I remember once being at a Blue Jays game and we were down 5 to 10 against another team. It was the 8th inning and I decided that it was over! I pestered my husband to leave. I had shopping to do :) We turned on the radio for the drive home and listened to the end of the game. Well, there was the equivalent of a break away in the 9th and the Jays came back to win 11-10. I have never, ever asked to leave early again!!

2. "It's like deja-vu, all over again." The phrase is nonsense, maybe. In fact, it almost defies explanation and perhaps it shouldn't be explained, but just accepted as the distillation of the weirdness of a situation - something happening again and again. It's akin to "Someone just walked on my grave," or "This has all happened before and it will all happen again." Maybe this is why Baseball keeps so many statistics. Perhaps to be able to predict, with some accuracy, when something, that has happened before, will happen again.

In all probability, if you pulled off a winner once, you can do it again :)

3. "The future ain't what it used to be." I'm not sure whether this is good or bad. Maybe the suggestion is that, because of prior knowledge, there will be fewer surprises in the future. Or maybe Yogi, had this ability to see into the future and found it disappointing. I'm not sure. I know in baseball we all hope that a new draft choice or a fortuitous trade will be the team's saviour. Perhaps the way the game is played now, based mainly on statistics, that there are fewer wild cards. Who knows?

It's probably a safe bet, in life, to work hard and hope to win the lottery!!

4. "A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore." Inverse inflation? Again I see that hope, that something worth a lot less, could be seen as delivering a lot more. Why would anyone even consider a nickel being worth a dime? Someone who believes in miracles!! Yo, Yogi!!

Bobble Heads in The Game of Life :)

5. "When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it." Do the impossible!!

6. "If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be." Perhaps, we just need to have imperfections and limitations to keep us going. A perfect world may be just too boring.

7. "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." Musings on that fork in the road, perhaps. Do any of us really know where we are going? Perhaps we just arrive somewhere and decide that this was the goal we set out to achieve. It is probably easier to record history then to predict the future, which probably will never be what it's supposed to be anyway.

8. "Half the lies they tell about me aren't true." An original catch 22. If you lied and said you were insane, in order to get out of the army, they would deem you sane and keep you in, because you were trying to save yourself. Maybe you need a little insanity to just keep in the game. Batter up?

The picture - a player contemplating the game of life. Just keep "nogging" along?

Have an awesome day!!