Figuring It Out

An essay about Living Life...

Baseball Hall of Famer Willie Stargell once said: “The problem with baseball is just about the time you figure out how to play it, they make you stop.”

OK, actually I’ve got no idea if Willie Stargell really said that or someone just said he said that and once you start looking into quotes and their origins, all kinds of quotes are misquoted or attributed to the wrong people, but I’m not going to do any research on this one because I really hope Willie said it and if he didn’t, he should have.

I love that quote because it not only applies to Baseball, it applies to Life.

And right now I’m thinking about all this because I just watched the 3-part Netflix documentary on Aaron Rodgers, 44 years ago John Lennon was killed on December 8^th and we’re about to enter a New Year which inspires a lot of us to make New Year’s Resolutions which we’re unlikely to keep, but we do it anyway because we want to be better people and Life is hard enough without False Hope.

We’re all (OK, maybe it’s just some of us) trying to figure it out.

And first up is…

Aaron Rodgers

So I’m watching the Aaron Rodgers documentary and Part 2 is about him taking ayahuasca (a plant-based psychedelic) and sitting around in the jungle beating on a drum with his face painted and a feather in his hair and frankly he and all the other people at their ayahuasca retreat looked like a bunch of New Age Dipshits.

Having grown-up during the ‘60s and ‘70s (a process has yet to be completed) I’ve been to gatherings where everybody is being cool and groovy and hugging way too much and saying stupid shit that’s only deep if you’re extremely high or extremely dumb like, “I just realized God is Dog spelled backwards, dude!”

Which reminds me of the Dick Van Dyke Show episode where Laura says their next-door-neighbor Jerry is deep and Rob replies:

“Jerry’s not deep, he’s thick.”

But that kind of response is considered Typical Male Aggression and if you tell a bunch of Scientologists expounding on their beliefs “sounds like a lot of horseshit” you might be invited to leave the party which isn’t always a bad thing.

Party Rule of Thumb (and you might want to write this down):

When some imbecile who’s learned a total three chords pulls out an acoustic guitar so everyone can sit around the fire and sing Michael Row Your Boat Ashore or We Shall Overcome or In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida my instinct is to go find some alcohol (a plant-based mood enhancer) unless the acoustic guitar player is Willie Nelson and so far it hasn’t been.

So that was my first reaction to the New Age Dipshit stuff Aaron Rodgers was doing, but my second reaction was at least Aaron was trying to figure things out and why did I need to have an opinion about how he was doing it.

As Aaron discovered, fame can be a pain in the ass and once you accomplish your Life’s Goal – in his case winning the Super Bowl – and your Life doesn’t change all that much, afterwards you might start asking “Now what?” which is a really good question unless you’re Patrick Mahomes and then the answer is: “Win another one.”

The Rodgers documentary also featured voice-overs from media members who apparently had to have strident opinions on everything and they had to be loud and outraged and they had to have those opinions right now this minute with absolutely no evidence to back up what they were saying and most of the time they were 100% wrong which didn’t stop them from having even more 100% wrong opinions and one of the few things I’ve learned from Life is you don’t have to have an opinion about everything.

As a character in some book whose title and author I’ve forgotten said:

“I’m comfortable not thinking about it.”

Which, let’s face it, is rich coming from me, but if you think about it (and I have): like the kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes my cartoons point out some pretty obvious stuff like Donald Trump being a bad loser and way too many guns leads to way too much gun violence and by the way, I’m pretty sure we all just saw the emperor’s dick.

That kid making obvious observations played an important role in peoples’ perception and willingness to admit the obvious and I hope to do the same.

In my opinion (which according to a previous paragraph I don’t really need to have) Aaron Rodgers has reached some pretty goofy conclusions, but I give him credit because he’s asking questions and working on spanning the distance between who is and who he wants to be.

Aaron Rogers is trying to figure it out.

John Lennon

As regular readers already know I went through (and I’m still going through it) a period of listening to early Beatles music because the records have been remastered and you can hear stuff you never heard before and a lot of John Lennon’s early stuff sounds angry, insecure and sexist.

For instance:

No Reply is about a stalker warning a girl who’s cut off contact that she ought be with him instead of the guy she’s with and You Can’t Do That is about a guy who’s insecure and fears people will laugh at him because his girl’s been talking to another boy—twice—and Run For Your Life threatens to kill a girl if she leaves him for another man.

Great songs about bad impulses.

If you read about Lennon’s early life (dad abandoned the family, went to live with his aunt, mother dies young when hit by a car) it’s pretty clear John had some issues, which—if you listen to his later music, like Jealous Guy—he was clearly working on.

Jealous Guy expresses thoughts and emotions that a young John Lennon was incapable of having and he was clearly evolving into a better person, so it’s fucked up that John was killed at 40. (Although, as my son — who is somehow even more cynical than I am — pointed out, if John stayed married to Yoko Ono another 10 years, he might’ve started using drugs again.)

Nevertheless…

John Lennon was trying to figure it out.

The Stoics

If it makes you feel any better (and in my opinion it should) 300 years before the birth of Christ a group of guys in bathrobes and Birkenstocks were walking around Ancient Greece and Rome asking themselves the exact same questions we’re asking ourselves today, like what does it mean to be a good person or how do you live a good life or why am I such an asshole when I’m around my family?

Different times, same questions.

The Stoics believed logic and reason were the keys to living well which led them to say wise things like:

• The source of our dissatisfaction lies in our impulsive dependency on our reflexive senses rather than logic.

• There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.

• The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t. What we have influence over and what we do not.

In other less elegant and possibly more profane words; we spend an enormous amount of time and energy worrying about things we don’t control (what other people say or do) and not nearly enough time focusing on the things we do control (what we say or do).

The Stoics offered some great advice, but I’ve got Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and one of his many tips for leading a Healthy and Satisfying Life is not going overboard when it comes to banging your slave boys, so maybe the Stoics had some issues as well.

But once again, give them credit, the Stoics were trying to figure it out.

Baseball and Life

In the ‘90s I decided I wanted to play baseball again and had access to Major League Players and Coaches and they were teaching me the principles of the game and I found those principles were also helpful in everyday living. No sport teaches you more about how to live Life than Baseball and maybe that’s because you play it every day and you have to learn how to grind your way through that tough schedule.

Now here are a few Baseball Concepts that apply to everyday Life:

Play The Best Odds And Live With The Results

When you’re managing a team you have to make decisions and early on I wanted all my decisions to work because I wanted to be perfect, but turns out that’s not possible. So I had to learn to consider my options and if one option worked 70% of the time and another option worked 50% of the time and a third option worked 30% of the time, you take the 70% option even though you know it won’t work 3-out-of-10 times.

And when you run into one of those 3-out-of-10 failures, someone will be happy to suggest you should have done something different (like do something that fails 7-out-of-10 times) and you have to ignore those uninformed and dumb opinions and realize that even though it didn’t work this time, you still did the right thing.

Which brings us to…

Process Over Results

Process is how you do things and results are what your process produces. If you obsess about your results (which fans and the media do all the time) you’ll change your process anytime it doesn’t produce the desired results, but as we’ve already seen if you want to succeed 70% of the time you have to live with failing 30% of the time.

Which explains why some teams are bad and stay bad; they won’t stick with any process long enough to see it produce long-term results and are always changing managers and players and GMs and philosophies because when they hit a rough patch they panic, which outsiders will encourage you to do and then when your new process doesn’t work out 100% of the time, blame you for panicking.

Perfect Is The Enemy of Good

And speaking of unattainable perfection, I had limited baseball skills, but there was one thing I could do; hit pitches on the outer half of the plate to the opposite field and try to hit for a high average, but I wanted to do everything and hit every pitch so I took low-percentage swings at pitches I didn’t handle well and made a lot of unnecessary outs.

My All-Time Favorite hitter, Tony Gwynn—8-time batting champion, 15-time All-Star, Hall of Famer—hit .338 lifetime which meant he made outs about 66% of the time, but Tony knew who he was and who he wasn’t and didn’t let trying to be perfect stop him from being good, and in baseball, if you’re good long enough you’re fucking great.

Keep An Even Keel

One night you’re 4-for-4 and on top of the world, but you gotta come right back out the next day and might go 0-for-4 and you have to accept both because it’s part of the game and that’s what Rudyard Kipling was talking about in the poem If when he wrote “If you can meet Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same” so it sounds like Rudyard Kipling was thinking about the same stuff as George Brett.

Today’s Lesson

If you’re trying to figure things out, realize it’s an unending process and the point is trying and I’m guessing we all know someone who acts exactly the same way they did in high school and isn’t trying to figure things out because when something goes wrong they don’t question themselves, they blame everybody else.

As some wise old baseball coach once said:

“Some people have 10 years’ experience, some people have one year’s experience 10 times.”

Odds are, we’re never going to totally figure it out, but the important thing is to try and not just be the same old asshole you were in 2024. Try to be a new and better asshole in 2025 which is my New Year’s Resolution and this year I think I can pull that off.

Today let’s wind this up with a song from a more mature John Lennon:

Merry Christmas, everybody.