“How are you, young man? No doubt you’re expecting a lecture, but I promise that’s the last thing I intend. Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely. I can even understand and sympathize. Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in your bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like and exercise in expedience and venality. I understand that brand of despair better than I wish. But it’s a different decision you’ve made that troubles me more deeply.
I mean your choice to give up golf.” - The Legend of Bagger Vance
Idealism, promise, expectation, hope. These are all good things. These elements do more than get us out of bed in the morning; they propel us into each day with the anticipation that something remarkable and worth while will take place.
We are a burst of energy in which no obstacle is too big. Exhaustion never even gets a chance to yawn because we are awakened to a mission bigger than ourselves. We embody the change we want to bring to the world and we believe we can do anything.
Then…
Challenge flanks us in a manner totally unexpected; completely blind-sided. We see a side to the Opposition that we never saw before and we are left disarmed, disrobed, and disheartened. The ideal, once fuel for life, offers nothing but the bitter taste of “what could have been”.
Cynicism encroaches as we question the work, the calling. “What’s the point?”, “Why bother?” “Where’s the meaning?” become just a few of the rhetorical questions we feast on. We come to a grinding halt.
We give up. We are sidelined. We are beaten. Something within us dies.
And we are left with a choice:
Fade away until nothing is left.
or…
Keep playing.
May you, in your moment of defeat, your season of disillusionment, be filled with just enough promise to believe that giving up on the game is never an option. And may you have the courage to keep showing up to the life no one else has been gifted to live.
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