Recently I found myself at the Pirie St playground with time on my hands, as my daughter was off doing important things like playing the ground is lava.

A basketball was available, so I decided to have a go at potting a backwards goal.  Standing at the three-point line, facing away from the hoop, I chucked the ball backwards to see if I could get it in.

Of course I failed, but undaunted, I tried again.  And again.  And again.

My partner regarded me with derision.  ‘Is that a good use of your time?’ he asked.  ‘Your chances of success are low.  And even if you get it in – have you acquired an important life skill?’

David is person of a technical bent which means he believes in things like ‘mathematics’, hence his ridiculous questions.

What would I get out of this exercise?  As it turned out, heaving a ball backwards uses stomach muscles you may not be generally aware of, but I certainly would be aware of them in the week to come.

‘I just want to see if it’s possible,’ I said.

Like many humans unburdened by knowledge of statistics and science, I am ridiculously optimistic of success. 

And I’m not alone, going by several conversations I overhead in the past month, related to Clyde Quay School’s incredible Taylor Swift competition.  Many people started sentences with ‘When I win the Taylor Swift tickets….’  Not if, but ‘when’.  They knew the odds, but in their minds they were already there, at Wembley Stadium, staring out at a sea of friendship bracelets.

I often wonder about the right balance of reality and delusion that a human should have.  There’s no point living in a fantasy land, and yet if we had no time-wasting dreamers where would we be?  All the world’s great art and inventions are pretty much the result of someone persistently pursuing their folly – until it turned into something we all accept has made the world a better place:   Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, powered flight, the Roomba.

If he had been a sensible young man, Peter Jackson might have become a public servant instead of making splatter horror movies and eventually going on to make Lord of the Rings. What would we do in Mt Vic without all those tourists wandering around trying to find Hobbit’s Hideaway?

And we wouldn’t have Taylor Swift, an incredible talent who also had such self-belief that she persuaded her family to move to Nashville so she could become a singing star.

I pondered all this as I meaninglessly chucked a basketball backwards for the umpteenth time… and turned around to see it go into the basket.

“Yeeee-ussss!!” I hollered, with the joy of someone who has won an Oscar or Grammy, rather than fluked a lucky shot at a suburban basketball hoop.

David grimaced, probably calculating some kind of cost benefit analysis of how much time I had wasted and how it could have been put to better use.

My daughter hid in shame, as I ran around the park making embarrassing victory gestures.

Back in the office on Monday, I lost no time in relating my story to my semi-interested workmates, and anyone else who would listen.  For a feat so slight, it buoyed my spirits in a surprising way.  Perhaps it was not so much the thing itself, but the fact that my determination had overcome chance, and that gave me a warm glow.

It was Oscar Wilde that said second marriages are a triumph of hope over experience, but in many ways life itself is – we are disappointed so often, and yet we dream – and take a chance.  Who would have it any other way?