The Question That Started it All #

"Do you always follow the rules?"

I was sitting with some other team parents, planning out a Trampoline and Tumbling meet that we were hosting later in the year. We were at the point where we were laying out the competition floor, figuring out how to arrange the equipment, where to set up the judges tables, the flow for the athletes as they went from the staging area to the equipment where they would compete.

The question caught me a little off guard. My first thought was, "Well, yeah, we have to follow the rules here if we want this to be a sanctioned event that counts for the athletes who are competing." Which is basically how responded in the moment.

On the drive home from the gym that night, the question was still bouncing around in my mind. I eventually realized that the question wasn't really about the specific situation at hand.

"Do you always follow the rules?"

I don't know if the emphasis I placed in that sentence quite conveys it, but the tone of the question was very much from a place of exasperation, from someone for whom rules were, in general, a nuisance to be ignored, to be avoided. Definitely not something that should be followed because someone says you should.

Which got me thinking about the question, really thinking about my relationship to "the rules".

What I realized is that my default response to a rule is to assume that the rule is a good one, that it makes sense, and therefore to follow it. Obviously, that is an overly optimistic - perhaps naive - approach to rules.

Which led me to the exploration of rules and my relationship to them.