Full Court Press

I have heard the sentiment expressed from many sources that every time you feel like you are getting ahead it seems that something comes up to keep you from staying too comfortable. I suspect that most people have said, or heard similar sentiments expressed in their lives.

This morning I woke up thinking about that sentiment, and my own experiences that agree with it, and I realized that life is like a basketball game and it is unreasonable to think that we going to get to take our shots uncontested. In basketball the only shots that are consistently uncontested are the ones that are only worth one point.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if life is like a basketball game it’s not an NBA game, it’s more like a pickup game on the street. The various players in the game often have vastly different skill levels and though the rules are pretty well established they vary a bit from location to location and from game to game.

If we could expect that we would not be challenged when we started to get comfortable with our current game then I would say that life was like a game of HORSE – you get to set up your shot, take your time, and the only real challenge is getting you skills to the point of being able to work within the rules of physics that govern where the ball will end up. That does not have the effect of producing players with enough skill to interact with others (both teammates and opponents) in a real basketball game.

As I started writing this post I realized the timing on this post – it’s playoff season in basketball (the NCAA tournament just ending and the NBA tournament just starting). Maybe this analogy is my unconscious response to the sports news.

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