9/16/2022
Rule #76: No Excuses. Play Like a Champion.
The joy and happiness I experienced on my wedding day is not something that should just happen once. I should be able to have days and experiences like that all the time!
It’s ironic to me that I’m writing an article about one of the happiest days of my life while watching a movie centered around that day – my wedding day! In my opinion, Wedding Crashers is one of the funniest comedies to be released in the past 20 years. It’s filled with more one-liners than any movie I’ve ever seen, and to this day, still has me laughing and repeating lines every time I watch it. My favorite line in the movie is a line I applied to my wedding day, and that I try to apply to my daily life: “Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion.”
Similar to so many other couples during the last two years, my wife and I rode a roller coaster ride to our wedding day. We got engaged in December 2018, had our wedding scheduled for May 2020, moved our wedding date three times due to COVID, ended up having an intimate ceremony in July 2020 with our immediate family and a small group of friends, and then had our big wedding celebration one year later in July 2021. While there were stressful moments along the way, I knew in my heart that nothing was going to get in the way of us having the celebration we always wanted.
On July 25, 2021, we had the best wedding and one-year anniversary party we could have ever imagined. The ceremony, the venue, the food, and the music were everything we could’ve asked for. If I could go back and live that day over and over again, I would in a heartbeat. But then again, why can’t I?
The joy and happiness I experienced on my wedding day is not something that should just happen once. I should be able to have days and experiences like that all the time! We get so caught up in the daily grind that we forget life is way too short and unpredictable to not enjoy every single day. What’s the point of working hard if you don’t take the opportunity to go out and enjoy what life has to offer?
The writers of Wedding Crashers might have had a slightly different meaning to rule #76 than how I interpreted it. My revision would be this: “Rule #76: No excuses. Enjoy your life, it’s way too short!”
- Nicholas Montani