Listening to a podcast with Fred Shoemaker I stumbled upon him saying “this is what life is.”
As a golf professional, he naturally discussed golf. But there was more to his description of how people experience the game, how it evolves, and how they compare it to their idea of what their experience should be.
One can think about golf as just a game, a profession, a hobby, or something other people do. However, there are principles in golf that one might consider as universal.
One of these principles is that while it is possible to explore all the things we should do or could do if we don’t consider the things as they are we’ll never be able to change them.
I can think about the many things I could do to change my swing in the future, and there will always be a lot of things I should have done better while executing the swing. But in the end, whatever the outcome, it is what happened. I can’t change that swing anymore. I can only learn from it.
The could and should we think about appear most of the time in those moments when we find it hard to be present to the situation. They reflect our relationship with the past, the future, authority, and our expectation to be in control. That is, they reflect who we think we should be in contrast to how we experience ourselves.
What we can do to enable us to learn what life actually is like. We can appreciate how normal the things that happen to us are and how to accept that they happen. The things we like as well as the things we dislike. The things we’ve learned as well as the things we haven’t learned yet.
Accepting doesn’t mean becoming a fatalist, or giving up on ambitions and hopes. Accepting is about learning what the flow of our life is like. Noticing what it is that occurs to us, noticing the coming and going, the cycles, the ongoing learning.
When we start to see things as how they are, we start to learn what we can and want to change. It’s when change becomes actionable.
It still doesn’t mean that we’ll have everything we desire, or that we’ll have a problem-free life. It simply means that knowing how life unfolds, and what is normal to us, enables us to focus on the things we can change and really want to change.
