By Brad Brain
Recently I was listening to a one-legged man tell the story about his church baseball game.
ad lost his leg to cancer when he was 9 years old. The baseball game was shortly after his leg was amputated at the hip. As you can expect, balancing on one leg and trying to hit a baseball is no easy task.
From the sidelines, his Dad shouted the standard baseball words of encouragement, “Keep your eye on the ball!”
In case you aren’t familiar with the expression, in baseball it is easy to watch the space where the ball is coming from as it leaves the pitcher’s hand, which means that you are not tracking the ball as it moves towards you. The result is that you end up swinging at where you expect the ball to be, rather than where the ball actually is. If you want to improve your chances of success you want to keep focused on your objective.
It was a good conference, but honestly, I didn’t give much more thought to this particular presentation until I got home.
Because it’s when I got home the spaghetti hit the fan.
One thing after another seemed to break. Nothing seemed to go right. Endless time-consuming, urgent problems that needed my attention all at once.
Here’s what I mean. I have homeless people camping in my back parking lot, leaving behind their drug paraphernalia, cigarette butts and condom wrappers for me to clean up. I have spent hours on hold with an internet company trying to get out of an unwanted contract and disputing unauthorized billings. I was focused on a task and wasn’t paying attention to my under-desk treadmill. I stepped sideways on the treadmill, and it sent me crashing into my standup desk, breaking it. My car battery is dead, and I can’t get it to take a charge. Problem is, it’s a LiFePo battery and I can’t jump start the car without causing expensive damage. The fence in my horse pasture needs repairing, which means pounding heavy fence posts by hand and the longer I wait to fix it the higher the odds the horses get out. Speaking of horses, I have a stubborn colt that decided he didn’t want to get back in the horse trailer after his vet appointment, which meant me walking a big, strong, panicky horse two kilometres along the side of the road to get home, with just a halter and lead rope. The bathroom door in my office isn’t locking properly and needs to be repaired or replaced. All this, and my house sitter is having issues with my home security system, resulting in the police being dispatched.
Kind of a lot for a guy to deal with, and the week is only half over.
What’s really frustrating me though is not just all this stuff that I have to deal with, but that all this stuff is keeping me from doing the work that I want and need to get done. I’m pretty cranky about the whole situation.
But all this stuff is just the background. The real issue for me right now, if I am going to be 100% candid, is not the stress of a litany of things breaking down.
It’s money stress.