Swing,
Batter, Batter . . .
Dear Nestlings,
Here I am, sitting and watching your brother’s baseball practice. He has a new coach this season, and this coach is a tad bit different than our past coach. Let’s play in character sketches for a minute, reduce a few people to their archetypes.
Sterling’s last coach was a quiet skills sort of guy. Sterling learned the minutia of baseball. When to throw. Where to there. What each position needed to do. Nary a word of hard-edged critique was heard. A gentle push there. A careful word here. In the midst of each game, it hardly mattered what happened. No debate of a call. No pain over a fault. Onward and upward to the next practice, the next chance to learn. Sterling grew and learned, and became confident in understanding the rules of baseball and knowing what came next.
This season, we have a new coach. Perhaps the easiest introduction for baseball fans would be to say he’s a Yankees guy. Not that I know much about baseball, but from what I’ve gathered they’re the team that has a bit of an attitude about them. And this coach does too. He’s prone to a bit of smack talk, likes to bring a loud speaker to practice, and can sound—at least on the surface—a bit more hard on the boys. He’s careful to be a builder and never goes too far, but he does push in a different way than Sterling’s prior coach ever did. And yet, for all his rougher edges, in the weeks Sterling has joined the Yankees, he has learned to throw a bit harder and no longer pulls his swings when he’s up to bat.
It’s made me think about life, watching Sterling with his two coaches:
About how different people teach you different things, and how you can’t see what a person really has to offer from their most visible surfaces.
About how easy it is to get comfortable in situations we know, to think of all their benefits and all the things we’re learning right where we are, without thinking about what we might be able to learn somewhere else.
It just doesn’t work to stay in the same situation day in and day out. It just doesn’t work to think only one kind of person can be your coach, your teacher, your friend. Variety and the unique flavor of every new opportunity is really what helps us grow and become more than we were before.
I’m glad Sterling hasn’t been with the same coach forever, no matter how much we’ve liked what he’s learned from each person on his journey. I’m glad he’s getting more than one thing from life as he’s brave enough to try new things. It’s hard to remind myself that I should do the same. That I should open myself up to change, and discomfort, and things I don’t understand. You’re all better at that, since childhood is pretty much taking what gets thrown at you. But I hope you’ll hold onto it as you grow older. That you’ll always be ready to step out into the next new thing. To learn wherever you are, and become the person you’re meant to be tomorrow, and the day after.
There’s good around the corner, there really is.
Love,
Mom