…actually it’s more like golf. You’ve got to go out and do it every day and live by the results. – Garrison Keillor, Love Me
Garrison Keillor is an American humorist. Like all good humorists he not only makes us laugh, he has a point to make, too.
The above thought talks about life, though I forget the characters and the context. It’s true, too. In golf, that deceptively simple, utterly evil game created by Satan on the seventh day while the Big Guy rested, you go out and you hack away. You can’t skip a hole and you keep your own score, too. You always, without fail, get the score you earn.
So it is in life. You have to go out and hack away every day. You can’t skip Wednesday and go directly to Thursday and you keep your own score. While others might have opinions on your life – especially if you are in the public eye – only you can keep an accurate tally of how you are doing. Like golf, we fill out our own scorecards and we tend to get what we’ve earned.
The results tend to speak for themselves, too. Presuming we let them. Some don’t. Some try to expand their success while others try to explain away their failures, as if failure is evil and needs to be distanced. This is silly, because as we’ve noted here before, failure is nothing more than a receipt issued by life showing lookie here, someone tried to improve themselves. Didn’t make it this time, but that’s OK. They’re better than they were before the effort.
You’ve got to go out and do it every day
Every single one of us can look back and say we are today to a great extent because of what we’ve done in the past. We cannot reach the summit of life without laying the foundation first. It is, virtually always, the winding stair that leads to the top.
… and live by the results.
Similarly, what we do today will determine what we are looking back on five, ten, twenty years from now. Every one of us is issued 24 hours every day. It is the only commodity all of us are issued in equal measure and what we are looking back on years from now depends on how much effort we put into today.
If we want to be looking down from a mountain top, we must put today to good use. Good days lead to good years and the next thing you know you are looking back on accomplishment. However, if we squander our time, we might well be looking up from a valley.
To an extent that might astonish some, the choice is ours.
