Flirting With Life
Modern life has a seriousness problem. Life is a musical thing and sometimes we should just dance and have fun.
Scottie Scheffler, the world number one golfer, had one goal for the Olympics.
“Have fun.”
He is a man on top of the world. He has five wins on the PGA tour this season, which makes him the first player since 1980 to have won five times on the PGA tour before the U.S. Open. He has won over $24,000,000 in earnings on the year, breaking the PGA Tour season earnings record before the season has even concluded. Safe to say, he is doing quite well and he is not done yet.
However, there was still some backlash on his goal despite the accolades speaking for themselves. Other golfers were surveyed on their goals and it was a unanimous goal, outside of Scottie, to win the gold medal. And people said Scottie needed to lock in. A man breaking records on the tour was somehow too loose, he needed to tighten up and focus a bit more.
Scottie went into the final round of the Olympics four shots back from the lead but these stories write themselves. He would fall even farther back after the first nine holes of the last round sitting six strokes back from the leader with nine holes to go. But never to fear, he birdied four of the last five holes to shoot a 62 and bring home the gold.
Maybe Scottie was on to something about simply having fun and staying loose while trying to chase down a dream. It is put quite well by Aldous Huxley, the famous English author and poet,
“It is dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me… to throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”
It doesn’t always have to be deeply serious. Scottie played free and released himself from any external pressure. The joy was in the process. He had a plan for The Olympics and held it lightly, not letting himself be consumed by the inevitable ebbs and flows of playing golf. If you are so good at golf, why must you be so serious all the time?
Scottie Scheffler found a way to make the heavy light.
Christopher Morales-Williams, a 400m runner for Canada, is here to have fun too. He’s only 19 but holds the Canadian 400m record, set an unofficial world indoor record, and won the NCAA championship in the 400m. He was asked about the pressure he’s facing at the Olympics,
“Now I just go out there and have fun. If I lose, I just go back to school and continue on with my life. But these guys, you know, they’re old. They’ve got cars, and kids. I don’t even own a car, I don’t even have to pay for gas. So it’s like, what do I even need to worry about? Spending money on pencils?”
There is no larger stage than the Olympics, the pinnacle of sporting events, but they simply wanted to have fun. It has gotten them this far. Morales-Williams may not win a gold medal this Olympics but at 19, he is well on his way to one in the future. Maybe, there is something to keeping it light and flirting with what life throws at you. It is easy to be serious, but it is hard to be light.
It makes me think of those who stare at their 401k all day, track every cent of their bank account, or follow every tick of the stock market. Those who stress over every penny and every monetary move. Those who save feverishly for retirement while sacrificing the now. While your coworker with 2 kids, and an extremely reliable minivan, who loves her family, thinks her job is fine, gets her 401k matched each month, pays no attention to what the experts have to say about the markets, and trusts in Jerome Powell and the Fed. She is on pace to retire a multimillionaire because of where she lives and how she moves so lightly. She does her best work because she takes her long-term plans lightly.
A person who brute forces success will never be successful. A person who must be happy will never be happy. If Scottie Scheffler, Christopher Morales-Williams, and our coworker have taught us anything, success is like a butterfly, the more you force it and pursue it, the more it eludes you. But if you turn your focus away from it and instead focus on the approach while moving lightly, it comes to sit softly on your shoulder. Alan Watts talks about how life is supposed to be light,
“Because we simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line.
Because we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at that end, and the thing was to get to that thing at that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
I assure you Scottie sang and danced along the way to his gold medal, and Morales-Williams did the same in his races. Scottie took joy in the here and now. He wasn’t so uptight and serious, there was no need. Scottie and Christopher flirt with life and have fun with it.
Flirting goes beyond what you do when you want someone to fall for you. It is what a healthy soul does when they don't take life too seriously and are in love with life. You are already here in the present moment so you might as well flirt and have a little fun with it, right?
Appreciate you, tap the like if you enjoyed. I would love to hear any thoughts.
-Scantron
Excellent post!
The post reminded me of a quote from Viktor E. Frankl's book Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”