Difficult Times

A 12 year-old Little League batting champion faces a major league pitcher who has just won the Cy Young award as the best at his trade.  Fifty pitches.  Fifty swings.  The kid hits nothing but air.  Electrocuted with frustration, the boy then does his all-star best to transform his Louisville Slugger into toothpicks.  

Why?

Did the pitcher make him miss?  

Did his misses make him angry?  

That would be the easy answer. 

The popular vote, I bet.

 But as when we say

 the sun rises in the east,

 the truth is far more illuminating. 

The kid missed, and abused his bat, because he simply hadn’t yet developed the skills and understanding to do otherwise. 

His problem wasn’t facing a great arm throwing smoke, curves, screws, slides, and change-ups that faked out his every reflex.  His problem was his own immaturity.  The same reason there are so few twelve year-old brain surgeons and airline pilots.

Nor was his problem going oh-for.  Besides being just another youngster who has not been taught to manage fear and pain, his problem was that, like lots of us even five times his age, he had yet to learn that nothing on earth has the power to make him feel a certain way.

In fact, his programming, as ours, taught him the opposite.  That his happiness was determined primarily by stuff like world events, social status, money, health, not to mention that all too familiar addiction: the approval of others.

I can swell with pride when I hear what a wise, enjoyable guy I am––then deflate with petulance when my every whim is not anticipated or my saintliness unrecognized. 

In the throes of that kind of lunacy, I’m ill-equipped to seize any day, much less one dressed in heartache.

This is many of us today.

How often we hear, “We are living in difficult times,” or sentiments to that effect––and believe it to be true. 

Our programming, so ego-bound, leaves little room for the possibility that there’s never been a difficult time.  Or a bad day.  Or a good day, for that matter.  It just appears that way.  We feel anguish and fright at levels we have no effective response for.  The easy conclusion is that the events cause our trauma, when in fact they only trigger it.  The cause is always in the mirror.  

Our beliefs, and how tightly we hold them, are a reflection of how we define reality.  And our reality is so commonly shaped by the chorus of cultural forces that drown out the voice of our heart, that unerring touchstone of intuition calling us to recognize the sacredness of all creation, and our kinship with it.

Do you think the kid will still be whiffing a hundred percent when he’s 20?  Me either.  Not if he’s devoted to being a good ballplayer, still has talent, and believes in himself.  

How about freeing himself from his programming?  That, we know, will be a tougher nut to crack. 

To do so requires two things.  As much dedication as does excellence in any endeavor.  And, the willingness to discover all the ways we’re a victim only of our own beliefs.  

For many of us it’s a never-ending endeavor to embrace the principle that ultimately there are no difficult times, only times that help us awaken to the enormous power within us: the power of choice.