Wins and Losses
Ask my sister, who played lots of games with me as we grew up together, I'm not a good loser.
Ask my family why we don't play Scrabble, and perhaps, it could also be said that in some ways I'm not a great winner either, although, I feel like I've made good efforts to be more humble.
I guess that a big part of my challenges with winning and losing come from an overly developed sense of fairness. When I see something unfair happening that creates winners that don't actually deserve the victories, I can become bitter, angry and disappointed. As a child that usually was reserved for what I saw as cheating or breaking rules in games. I understood the role of luck, and yes, of skill, but unfairness always confounded me.
I spent a lot of time as a teacher (and as a parent) teaching fairness and ways to handle winning and losing. For many years I was involved in efforts to teach conflict resolution to middle schoolers with high hopes for them to be able to get to win-win situations. And yes, I was a big champion of those 1970's "new games" that were less about winning and losing - and more about just having fun together.
And yet. Our society builds so much into winning (and losing) that I still struggle to just "play the game" for fun and not be so dependent on winning to make me feel that I'm ok. I certainly spent the last several years feeling like a loser as I participated in legislative efforts to move policies that I felt could help our whole society "win." Year after year I would attend committee hearings where the votes would count out against me and I'd walk away with a sense of futility. What good was my participation? What use was my story? Why show up?
This year the wins at the state legislature have felt pretty good. I've breathed a bit easier after my testimony, and I've walked away with a sense of accomplishment. However, having been on the other side of the votes, I'm hearing those on the losing end of the vote a bit differently. I do wonder why it has been so difficult to sit down together the way I did with my middle-school students to work out the win-wins. It has given me a bit of perspective about the bitter divisions that are the undercurrent of our country's current dis-ease.
The recent city council votes against the East Phillips neighborhood's efforts to re-purpose an empty warehouse (the Roof Depot site) stand out in the way those in power can feel like they've reached a win-win when they decide the outcome is good-enough for those who lost. It is sort of obvious that there is a difference between compromise and win-win. In situations where compromises happen it feels more like lose-lose. No one gets what they really wanted or needed. In this case, the city didn't get all they wanted, but they did get what they needed to be able create a new public works maintenance site. The residents, on the other hand, did not get what they needed, which was clearly to not have additional vehicle pollution brought into a neighborhood suffering from the effects of pollution and racial injustice.
Our city's changes to funding for neighborhood organizations now has us in a place where we could lose what we have come to know as KFNA, and that really has me feeling sad. So much of the fabric of our community has come from the efforts of staff and volunteers of our neighborhood organization creating ways for us to gather, interact, learn from and challenge each other. I can point to so many ways I've grown as a person, a resident, and as a business owner from the efforts of our neighborhood organization. Losing KFNA would be a lose-lose for our city as a whole.
As a business owner, winning and losing comes in a very specific form, because in the end it all comes down to "winning" enough customers and creating sales to meet our expenses. Every month I print out a Profit and Loss (P&L) and think about being profitable as winning - and not being profitable as losing. There are lots of other ways in which I might feel I'm winning, like getting better at managing our waste, or keeping a resident of Nicollet Square employed, or hearing positive comments from a neighbor about a meal they had from us. Those wins unfortunately don't mean as much as the P&L numbers that have been showing losses month after month since March of 2020.
I'm back to feeling like a bad loser. I probably should have learned a bit more after 16 years of running this cafe, although, I'll admit, whatever I have learned seems to be of less use in these pandemic-sort-of-post-pandemic years. Getting this far seems like some sort of win, but being where I am currently seems like a pretty big loss is hard to avoid.
Avoidance is one of my life-patterns that I've had to try to unlearn. I prefer to say everything's ok, to not face losses. I don't like getting into games I know I'll lose. I don't like to be reminded of the big losses I have faced during the course of my life. I still won't watch a Viking's game because as a teenager, I was so deeply invested in their winning and thus hurt by their big losses (which I, of course, thought were due to 'cheating').
I can't blame "unfairness" on my cafe's current losses. I do feel like pointing to lots of ways in which support for small businesses is lacking or how big businesses have created a playing field that is tipped in their favor. But I can also see how well I've been supported as a small business by friends and neighbors, by local, state and federal government actions. I continue to be grateful. I'm hanging on to hope for enough skill, and a bit of luck, to pull out a win this spring.
What would it be like for you to lose a place like Butter? I do appreciate everyone who has made that walk to our counter and asked what we need and shared why they want us to win. Join us and help us find a way to make that walk along this long green path and come up with a win-win.