The Teams We Cheer Against
Like millions around the world, I found myself caught up in the excitement of the football tournament. As my son observed with a smile, I almost always end up cheering for the underdogs.
After watching England play Congo, he asked why I never seem to support a European team.
I surprised myself with the answer.
"It is because they remind me of colonialism."
The words came without much thought, yet once spoken they rang true. I grew up in a world where colonial attitudes were not distant chapters in history books. Later, I worked for a British helicopter company on the East Coast and for a Dutch import-export company in Penang. Those years exposed me to personalities whose confidence often felt inseparable from a sense of superiority. Fairly or unfairly, those experiences left a lingering bitterness.
As someone who writes about universality, non-duality, and seeing beyond race or nationality, I found myself smiling at the contradiction. Apparently, the old conditioning still has a pulse.
That evening, after the match, I sat outside with a cigarette and simply watched my thoughts.
There was no need to justify them, nor was there any need to condemn myself for having them. Feelings are not commandments. They are visitors carrying stories from the past.
Then another realization quietly appeared.
It is all water under the bridge.
Not forgotten. Not denied. Simply no longer something worth carrying to the grave.
The world still gives us reasons to grieve. Places like Gaza remind us that injustice has not vanished. History continues to echo in the present. But if I allow every fresh wound in the world to feed every old wound within me, then I become another prisoner of history.
Perhaps the real practice is neither forgetting nor clinging.
It is remembering with compassion, acknowledging the scars, and then refusing to let them define how I meet the next human being.
Football, strangely enough, reminded me of that.
Awareness does not erase our conditioning overnight. It simply shines enough light upon it that one day we may smile, bow to it, and finally let it pass.
Wallahu A'lam.
#FootballAndLife #ShadowWork #Awareness #ColonialMemory #Healing #Universality #SelfInquiry #Mindfulness #CheeseburgerBuddha #FIFA #WallahuAlam
