The golfer strode onto the green, his high socks pulled up well over the ankles of his garish pink trousers. With baseball cap and tinted sunglasses helping him to stare down the glaring sun,n he placed his ball upon his tee, pressed his legs together carefully, so as not to crease his salmon coloured pleats, he stepped back and took a mighty swing. The satisfying metallic clink of club hitting ball chimed in his ears as he watched the white dot becoming smaller and smaller, whistling majestically through the crystal blue skies...............before careening down to earth like a shot bird, ploughing through a vale of thick tree branches and down into a rough patch of bushes 20 feet away from the green. The golfer reflexively tore his cap from his head and threw it to his feet followed by a torrent of words his mother wouldn't have been proud of him for using. It just wasn't fair, he shouted, within the privacy of his own mind. Rather than writing it off as pure bad luck he felt a great sense of injustice. He'd prepared so well, bought all the right equipment, practised his swing for hours in his garage, and for what? Only for his damn ball to be stranded miles out from where he wanted it to be? His discouraged mind darted away from the fairway and back to the comfortable club house, where he knew that by this hour they'd showing be football on the TV and he could bury his disappointment at the pit of his stomach under a roast dinner and a few pints of beer. Seductive though the mental image was, the golfer shook his head and brought his mind back to the matter at hand. Despite the disappointment the game wasn't over; in fact it had barely started. He could either give up or swallow his disappointment and forget about how badly he wished the last shot had gone his way. It was what it was. He could either give up or play the ball where it lay.
To say that life brings disappointments is, needless to say to anybody who's ever been alive, something of an understatement. The French philosopher and author Albert Camus referred to this reality as the absurd; the fact that neither the existence of a human mind which has a very idealized view of how life should b,e nor, as he saw it, a cold, mechanical and indifferent universe were bad things in themselves, but that the existence of one within the other was almost comically cruel. Although I wouldn't be as fatalistic as Camus, there's point in denying that for almost all of us, life has often presented us with situations that didn't work out the way we would have liked them to and has led us to places where we wished that we weren't. For many of us, disillusionment is a very real possibility when we find ourselves in lives that are unrecognizable from the ones we had hoped we would be living when we were younger. In some cases, we find ourselves here despite all of our best efforts, despite having worked hard and done all the right things and feel, just like the golfer, that we've been the victims of injustice. In other cases we find ourselves in places that we don't want to be and know that it was our own lack of effort in the past that brought us there and that we only have our past-selves to blame. Both these situations can be equally upsetting. Sometimes we can be in either of these spaces or neither and can be blind-sided by a sudden misfortune; the death of a loved one, an accident or sudden illness, an unexpected breakup which turns our world upside down or further compounds our misery. In these times, it's always easier and more seductive to wallow in despair or self indulgence, rather than attempt to make a change, particularly when we compare ourselves to those around us. Many people, indeed I would say most people, have a particularly fixed view in their head of how their life is supposed to be, either from a young age or sometimes built up over years of living our lives and watching them fall into place. Often those images come either from the expectations of our friends, parents, the general society around us or, for many, the lifestyles of the great and the good that we watch from afar on TV, magazines or through gossip columns, something that these days is so common in these days of celebrity worship that it's just as large a part of lots of people's lives.
When our own lives fail to match up to expectations, the unavoidable comparisons we make in our heads can become so much of a torture that wallowing in despair and calling the whole game off may seem like the only option. “Why haven't I achieved this?” you might ask yourself. “I worked so hard in college” or “I really was sure I was getting that promotion? Why did I make that mistake? Why did the girl I love leave me? If only that hadn't happened things would be different, things would be better.” As tempting as it is to indulge in fantasy and waste our time imagining having perfectly chipped our shot onto the putting green, doing so is only frustrates us further, distracting us and wasting our energy, and denying ourselves the truth about the power we still have over the situation. The reality is that even if things aren't the way we'd like them to be now the game isn't over until it's over, as long as we accept that we must play the ball where it lands and not where we wish it had landed.
In a time when for almost anyone alive in the western world we are now facing more uncertainty than we've ever known, it's important to remember, though admittedly difficult to believe sometimes, that no matter how different our lives now look from what they once were or what we expected they would be this is not necessarily a disaster. As much as we might wish that our lives were photocopies of our seemingly more successful acquaintances or our heroes, each and every one of us is a unique human being living a unique life that isn't less valid just because it doesn't live up to the vague standards of others. No matter where you are or what you have done, or not done, or what difficulties might face you, if you stop wasting your time wishing things were different and take the best shot you possibly can now with the ball placed wherever it is in front of you you can begin to move forward again. The life you move forward to may not look anything like the one you were expecting and it certainly won't be perfect, but it will almost certainly be better than staying stuck where you are. To be open to all possibilities that is an incredibly liberating experience; often because you may find something better than you had imagined before but even more so because without the rigid expectations you had previously held you might actually be able to enjoy what's coming more than you would have been able to before.
The golfer hitched up his pink pants and attempted to balance on the rough soil, his feet finding a a footing as he straddled the ground either side of prickly patch of briers. With another flurry of mother-upsetting expletives, he unsteadily raised his club high above his head at an awkward angle which he hoped would connect with the ball. While struggling to keep his balance, his attention was caught by something far further up above his club, a sweet soft twittering sound, high and musical. He turned his eyes upwards and saw high above his head, on one of the branches that had caught his ball on it's initial descent earlier, the most beautiful bird. It seemed to sparkle in the sun as it perched on it's branch and puffed out it's splendid plumage. It was such a surprising sight that the golfer paused for a moment before readjusting his stance. To think, he thought, momentarily forgetting the bad news on his scorecard, I've been here so many times completely surrounded by all this nature and I'd never noticed it was here. Maybe it was worth the duff shot. With that he closed his eyes and lurched his club at the ball. It scudded roughly before finally shuddering into the sky and dropping somewhere in the distance that was at very least slightly nearer to the green than where it had started out.
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