I was talking with a friend of mine who is an author. He works for a baseball franchise and he told me about a prospect who wasn’t working out for the team. He said the prospect was a good fielder but an exceptional hitter and this is why they signed him. When he arrived at the team, they worked on his mechanics for hitting. For some reason, he just couldn’t get it together so they released him. He went to another team and hit 20 something home runs in a year, batted for a good average and turned everything around.
A reporter asked him, “What did they tell you to do that your old team wasn’t doing?”
The player replied, “They told me to go up there and hit.” No mechanics work, no age-old wisdom, just do what you do best and get the job done however you need to do it. Have fun doing what you do best.
Isn’t that funny? Sometimes we get so hung up on doing a great job, pleasing others that we forget to do what we do best. Be ourselves. Trust your instincts. Attend to business with a mind on being the best you can be and do what you do. The rest, as they say, is history.
A friend of mine was struggling with his confidence. “I go to these meetings and see these guys who got it all over me. I feel inadequate, like I don’t have the language and the wisdom they have and it’s intimidating.”
No one really knows what they are doing. Everything is trial and error. No matter how much you think you have it figured out, there’s always going to be something there to remind you you don’t. There it is. That’s life. We stand in the box and take our swings.
We all suffer from a certain amount of imposter syndrome. The older I get the more I see the folly of the world. I see ineptitude causing others to starve. I see arrogance standing in the way of children becoming the best they can be. I see a lack of imagination stifling progress. I see the wars and blight of indecency ravaging countries and pain and suffering resulting from greed and narcissism. I see suffering that doesn’t need to happen and it feels like there isn’t a damned thing that you can do about it. I know better, though. I’ve learned that while we’re riding the rails on this mystery train, there’s always something to do that will inform us.
As a teacher, I saw a number of administrators come and go. Everyone was trying to figure out the machinations of success — that sweet elixir that would boost test scores and take the school to another level. I learned that there are certain qualities you needed to become a good teacher. Classroom management was critical, and I never really mastered that. I gave a little in the management category to allow for students to have an hour where they could take a break from being told what they needed to do. I gave them creative assignments and explored their creativity with them. I discovered that we could have good conversations and have a good laugh or two.
I was a good enough teacher to hone my instincts. One of the great lessons I learned was you need to meet people where they are and show them you care. More often than not that helped me out of jams and helped me get the results I needed. Students needed to know they weren’t alone in this world. I couldn’t fake it. I had to stand in the box and take my swings. They knew the days I cared and the days I didn’t or couldn’t muster up enough empathy to take on their pain. I always showed up, though. They knew I was there for them, and they knew that I wanted to help them through it and together we would figure out what was working for us in life and what wasn’t.
A friend of mine told me she is nearing the end of her life. Our text exchanges document a history of hope, encouragement and optimism for the future. Slowly they changed to a realization that she was going to be put on palliative care. At one point, in our exchanges, she said to me words to the effect that, “I know there’s nothing more I can do, but I love God, I love life and I know that this means something. I know there is something more.”
She is a teacher, still showing up for her students, still standing in the box on the front lines being an example to others about courage in the face of death and how faith may be able to carry us to our reward.
I read a line in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions.” Mary Young, a character who was alone in the world, never had any children, lying on her deathbed uttered a phrase to a Nigerian nurse whom had only been there a week, didn’t speak her language and felt no kinship with black Americans. Here is what she had to say about death. “Oh, my… Oh, my.” Vonnegut writes that this message traveled to the one person who meant anything to her in her life, releasing “a cloud of telepathic butterflies.” He wasn’t there when she passed, but he felt a tap on the shoulder and heard a faint voice whisper in his ear while he was driving, “Oh, my… Oh, my.”
We stand in the box and hit for the time that we have in the proverbial game of life on this earth. The curves that get us out, the fast balls that slip past us, the hits we make with the powerful clock of connection and sometimes the graceful grand strut when we’ve hit one out of the park all have something to teach us. “We win some, we lose some,” but we always step up to the plate and take our swings. We manage our emotions and the failures and I am seeing that learning how to fail gracefully is the greatest lesson. We stand in and take our swings. “Oh, my… Oh, my.”
spirit beat 