Ok, Ok, I care who you marry a little bit, because I want them to be kind and for you both to help each other grow and all that wonderful stuff, don’t get me wrong, I’m not callous. But there’s two world-views that I want you to find the balance between that I think are so vital to functioning in this life.
World view numero uno. Sovereignty. That’s right, that there are a lot of things in this world that you have no control over. Period. As much as you might strive, there are just things that you have no say in, and that you will never be able to master.
Dos. You are the master of your fate, the captain of your soul, and everything you have in this life is due to your hard work, perseverance, and choices.
People so frequently bleed almost entirely into one camp. (For the record, if forced to choose one, I say pick the first. I’m not sure we really want to claim to be the captain of our ship when we come face to face with God.) They’ll say that “I’m a self-made man”, or “I built the greatest iphone in history”, or “I invented electric underpants”. The other side will constantly be talking about how nothing ever goes their way, or if they only could catch a break, or “I would have gone D1 except for...blank”.
The thing is, both are valid.
We really do have choice. We really do control a lot of what we do. We certainly can train our mind and our thoughts to dwell on what we’d like them to dwell on. The positive person and the negative person have both trained themselves to be that way, and it’s certainly possible they could become the opposite with practice. The athlete really possibly could have gone D1 with the right application of practice and more practice.
Conversely, there are a billion things we don’t have control over. Who our parents are, where we were born, height, shape, allergies, death, etc etc. And as much as our precious science is on a warpath to figure out all the answers, it won’t. It can’t. And it’s really not its job. We just have to accept that we can’t control everything.
So, we must learn to marry the two. Too much to one side and we only find problems. We must accept what we can’t control, posturing in a position of submission, and we must accept the wonderfully burdensome mantle of choice and responsibility (“wonderfully” used sarcastically).
To bring this back to golf, which are the folks I generally write for, what this means is: we must find a way to use every moment to hone our confidence and thoughts, while also using every moment to remind ourselves some stuff just is beyond us. We can do everything perfect, hit the flagstick and have it ricochet back into the water (ALWAYS a good time). We can even find joy in both of those things, the mastering of our thoughts and the fact that we don’t have to control the whole world.
If you can marry these two world-views, I think you’ll be primed for so much more peace, and likely success, in this life.
Shoot for the moon!
-Michael