"Best Day" 's do not exsist

     The Italian poet, Cesare Pavese once wrote, "It's no the days we remember; it's the moments." In all honesty, I have no idea who Cesare Pavese is, but he seems to have the right idea. When I was young and naive, I always wondered why I could never remember what was the best day of my life. As I got older, I would blame it on my inability to keep track of individual days, or my undiserable attributes of forgetfulness. But in all reality, my forgetfulness was not at fault, it was the way I was thinking. We don't have "Best Day" 's; we have "Best Moment" 's. And personally, I can think of no better example than my recent trip to a small town called Neosho. My reason for venturing to this community was in an effort to prove my potential debate-related skills. After a five-hour drive to the school, I had mentally prepared myself. I had even created space for a trophy in my suitcase. I had set my expectations high. Expectations are a funny thing. If you go into a situation with high expectations, and you don't meet them, you are left disappointed. But if you set for yourself low expectations, and you don't win, you aren't surprised because you expected to lose. And of course, as I journeyed into my first round of Public Forum Debate, my expectations were higher than Justin Bieber's and the stack of hair left after his haircut combined. After being demoralized in our first two rounds of debate, I made a strong realization... my partner Zack Dunn (who is the second best human being in the world, after me, of course) and I were just two lowly Freshmen up against people who had been debate for years. We simply stood no chance. The next twelve hours was a low time of sulking. But as I walked into the third round of debate the next day, I had a new mindset. In Boy Scouts, there is a interesting motto: "Expect for the worst, pray for the best." And as I prepared mentally for the debate, I began to understand the depth of those simple words. You can't always expect to win, expectations are not meant to be held high. All we can do is simply hope and pray for the best results. And that's exactly what we did; we expected to fail, but we sure hoped we didn't, and we had fun during it all. And in our lives, we must accept the Boy Scout motto. We can't always win, and we can't always expect to win. We must simply expect to lose, try our hardest, pray to succeed, and just have fun. And although we received a 2-2 rating, this  will forever stand as not a "Best Day" but a "Best Moment", because I understood that we can't always win. But if we follow with the Boy Scout understanding, we will always feel as if we had won. Perhaps the Russian philosopher, Leo Trolsty puts it best when he explains, "We only lost because we said we lost." Winning is not decided by the success we make, rather the success we expect to make.