The Green Fields of the Mind and Heart and Life

Every baseball field is different.

Every ballpark is different. Between the lines, the field itself is uniform, mostly …groundkeepers can let the grass grow a little higher and other tricks.  But the playing field itself differs. Wide or narrow foul territory keeps a ball in or out of play.   Walls are of different heights and distances from the plate and angle in various ways.  It’s a game affected by the wind and, when the wind is blowing out at Wrigley Field …. For “a game of inches” the field matters.  

As in so many other ways, baseball is like life and supports our need to “learn” how to “play the game,” at home and away, under different conditions and moments in time. Even in the friendlier confines of the “home park,” the way is treacherous. The defense controls the ball and owns the playing field when you are at bat.  Think about it, nine people against one of you and it does no good to get three quarters of the way through the defenders if you don’t make it the last 90 feet.  While batting in one’s home park on a spring day with the season still to be conquered, before a cheering crowd, is comforting, you can never forget that the “enemy” inning after inning has captured the field when you are trying to score. 

Playing on a different field is even more demanding. The players seem a little bigger. The distance between the bases a little further, and the pitcher nearer to the plate. And while sometimes the contours of the park are made for you, other fields are all-out wrong.  The crowd is against you. It is foreign territory, like so many of the fields of combat, struggle, accomplishment and disappointment on which our lives play out.

Think in general about the mechanized nature of standard grids.  Many of us seek them out, our only comfort. They may, and only may, make the odds more calculable. There are operating models, standard guidelines, folk wisdom available for guidance.

Only some call it refreshing when we experience non-standardized reality, i.e. the present and the future. Problems, people, situations, places---all different and facing us with the need to develop new approaches, creative strategies, imaginative “plays.” But it the tonic of life, that for which we are prepared, and it can be “played.”

So much of the human experience over tens of thousands of years was spent across changing “fields.”  We came to see change as “opportunities.”  We struggled to devise new strategies and establish new stabilities.  Our DNA was shaped by such a world.  We, the hominid survivors, were tested by our ability to adapt to new “playing fields.”

Baseball to many of us, is not just “a game.”   It is a “break-away,” by which we learn to value the essential fresh start---no outs, first inning, bat in our hand---and gain confidence in our ability to leave “home” and enter life’s many and different and difficult green fields of “play.”