Play Ball!

You know, I was thinking the other day. And yes, I was thinking about something in particular. My life. Don't switch channels yet, I'm not going to get spacy and philosophical and poetic on you. In fact depending on your age, what I say just might be relevant in some way to your life. I didn't just sit down and tell myself, I am going to think about life here for awhile. Something made me do it. I was compelled, even coerced into thinking about it. And once I was into it, it was a serious session. Very serious.
I have always thought about life as being analogous to baseball in a lot of ways. In the past when I put life situations in terms of baseball, it just seemed to make sense. A lot of sense. While it may be true that to be able to make this analogy you must be a die-hard baseball fan. Actually, maybe just being a fan isn't even good enough. You have to really understand baseball. You have to have some real connection to it. Like maybe you played baseball at some time in your life. Maybe you coached little league. Lots of people think baseball is a boring game. That it doesn't move fast enough, like football. They just don't understand what they're looking at. There is so much going on in a baseball game that if you don't know what you're looking for you wont see it.
See what I mean? I've just described baseball and if you replaced the word baseball in the paragraph above with life, it would have made sense. Here's another example. In life there's going to be successes and there will be failures. Just as in baseball, you aren't going to win every game. You're not going to hit it out of the park every time you get up to the plate. We all know that, even if you don't know baseball. That's kind of a no-shit-Sherlock fact. Life's the same way only sometimes it doesn't seem so obvious as it does in baseball. Here's a really good one, to be good in baseball you can't just say I'm going to play baseball and be a great baseball player. For starters, if you're not athletic, fuggidaboutit. It ain't happening. You need to choose something else to excel at. If you are athletic, then you're going to have to work hard to be good. You have to want it. You have to want it bad. You have to have grit in your gut wanting it bad. That means your level of desire to play baseball well has to break the desire needle. The same could be said of people who excel at something else in life. Only it may not be as obvious as it is in baseball.
Are you getting my drift? Baseball mirrors life situations and simplifies them. Makes them easier to understand. Read those last two sentences again. Makes life situations easier to understand. If life consisted of one human being, our self, it would be pretty simple. It wouldn't take long before we knew what we liked, didn't like, how we reacted to certain things, and so on. But life isn't just 'me'. There are family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, bosses, coworkers, teammates... Life is a series of interactions with other people. Sometimes, maybe even often, things go well. Sometimes they don't. People are very complicated. What you see is rarely what you get when it comes to people. Life with other people is not black and white. It's a million shades of gray and some of them are really freaking ugly. I've lost my analogy with baseball, but stay with me.
So where am I going with this? This is where I'm going, life is hard. It's damn hard. Oh, I know there are silver spooners out there who have a good, easy life but what kind of life is that? What are they contributing? Nothing. You have to get off your ass and do something and contribute to the world for your life to have any meaning. That's my second no-shit-Sherlock fact. Life can and does have many gratifying times for most of us. But we have to work for it and often make sacrifices. Very difficult choices. And who amongst us has not lost a loved one? Not one single living being can say they have never lost a loved one. Is that not hard? And who amongst us has not loved and lost, as Mr. Shakespeare put it? Well if you haven't, you're part of a very small group. If you have you know well how hard that is.
It's hard alright. And for most of my life I had this misguided notion that when I got older life would get easier. I could retire, not have to get up early and go to work and put up with a bunch of pricks that annoyed me, it would be great. And you know what, not having to get up early and go to work and deal with a bunch of pricks is great. But getting older is not. And the worst part about it, life stares you in the face, grabs you by the throat, sits you down, humbles the shit out of you, and makes you think. And the first thing it makes you think about, your mortality. It looks right into your big wide eyes and says you're not going to live forever. And you want to ask, so how much time do I have left? And life replies, with a shrug of the shoulders, don't know. Meekly, hoping not to offend this badass monster called Your Life, you ask, so what's left? What do I need to do? What can I do?
Notice that one of the questions wasn't what's life all about? That's a question for amateurs, young amateurs. Since most of your life is behind you, you already know what life is all about. Well, your life anyway... You've been there and done it already. If you didn't get it right, too  late. Next question?
There's just a very sobering, jolting, face-slapping reality to knowing that due to the nature of life on earth your time on earth is limited. Very limited. So your natural inclination is to think, what's important? Aha! That's what you should have been thinking about all along. Not what's its all about. You cant know what it's all about until you know what's important. That's what you focus on.
And what's really sobering is the answers to that will probably be obvious. Just like baseball. Who's on first?...