Grow the Game®

Chazz Woodson - Words of Wisdom
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The Land of What If

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!

Just for today, I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle my whole life problem at once. I can do something for twelve hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime.”

I’m reading Toughness, by Jay Bilas right now. He tells the story of a high school basketball game in which he was played in, after which his father mentioned that he looked distracted. Jay explained that he had two tests and a paper the next day and he’d left too much for the night before. His father responsed, “You know, it’s okay for you to concentrate only on the game while you’re playing. You’re committed to being there, so you might as well devote all of your attention to it. It didn’t do you any good to think about school while you were playing. It didn’t get you any closer to getting it done, and it didn’t get you any closer to playing your best.”

Presence. It’s not just about being here, and trying to concentrate on what we are doing. Presence is also not worrying about world outside of the moment. And why would we worry, anyway? To torment oneself with or suffer from distrubing thoughts; fret. This is what it means to worry, as defined by dictionary.com. What good does it do us to willingly worry about anything? Worry comes from letting our minds wander to the the land of “what if.” What if we don’t get something done? What if s/he does this? What if I can’t do that? As I used to hear when I was younger, “If if was a fif’ we’d all be drunk.” IF there’s a possibility for all of those less than favorable outcomes, then that means there’s DEFINITELY a possibility of favorable ones. So there’s no need to torment ourselves.

Words carry weight. One of the best things that we can do for ourselves in learning to be present is to eliminate the word worry from our vocabularies, which will eventually eliminate it from the list of activities in which we are willing to engage. From there we can work on focusing on the present task without fear of the land of what if.

Make it a GREAT day!

Stay blessed.