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Post Game Review: The Zen of Bowling

 

As we have drawn parallels between bowling and being a follower, it may be helpful to summarize some of the key concepts we worked through.

 

Each frame represents a crucial aspect of the experience, reflecting broader lessons applicable to life's pursuits.

1. Just as the first ball thrown sets the benchmark for the game, individuals establish themselves and form connections, embracing the process of starting out and norming within their endeavors.
2. The tools and equipment, symbolized by the bowling ball, represent precision, value, and customization, mirroring the importance of preparation, investment, and tailored approaches in life's pursuits.
3. Achieving a turkey or badger, with consecutive strikes, illustrates persistent success amidst nerves and changing conditions, highlighting the benefits of consistency, adaptability, and resilience in the face of challenges.
4. Working to find the sweet spot and adapting to maintain optimal productivity isn't easy, but it's easy, but it's key to success. This means humility and teachability in success. Arrogance has no place.
5. However, even with skill and precision, encountering a 7-10 split reminds us of the inevitability of setbacks and the need to manage unwinnable scenarios, learning from failure and being open to the unexpected joys of success.
6. Bumpers serve as a starting point, encouraging beginners and providing support as they build towards success.
7. While an empty frame signifies failure as an inevitable part of the journey, prompting individuals to regroup, learn, and try again. Learning, or not, the empty frame is disheartening. Failure isn't always an option, the key is to fail well -- learn from it and do your best to time your failures, your learning, your adjustments to practices and low cost scenarios.
8. Reserving a lane marks the beginning of the journey, requiring deliberate timing and coordination.
9. League play embodies teamwork, strategy, persistence, and growth in a way that goes beyond a simple commitment; it fosters camaraderie and shared goals.
10. The Perfect Game is a reminder to value the right thing -- and set the setting right goals while striving for excellence, and finding true fulfillment in the journey, that being the best outcome.

 

 

The Zen of Bowling

You are on a journey. You are following someone, an ideal, or an ambition. Choose well, for the road may be long and you will face obstacles. The challenge before you is to follow deliberately, to follow well, to follow boldly. Despite anxiety, nerves, fear, complacency, underdeveloped skills, or discouragement you need to know that you aren’t alone and you’re not the first to feel that way.

 

Take your time and start well.

 

 

Prepare yourself to follow well. If this leg of journey is to be lighthearted and pleasant, enjoy the shortcuts and the scenic routes. However, if this leg of journey is to be of import and have lasting consequences for yourself and others, be sure to know your limits and embrace them, not to accept failure or mediocrity, but know where to grow and learn and be aware of risks, specific to you.

Encourage those around you, if you are with others, for they may be experiencing challenges that you know nothing about. It may be difficult to do with the challenges you are currently facing, but if you are able to encourage, challenge, and teach, the impact you have on that follower may have ripples you cannot imagine.

 

When you, or others you meet, face failure, be gracious. Missing the mark, as defined by you, others, or the ideal you follow, is likely to happen soon or later. It probably won’t be a wholesale failure, but it will sting. Learn the feeling, remember that feeling. When you feel that way again you will know that it’s not fatal and that you can pick yourself up and continue again.

 

Unfortunately, at some point, on some leg of some journey – likely an important one – you may experience a significant failure. Again, know that it need not be the end. However, you will have questions and it will likely cause you to reflect who you really are. If it doesn’t, you need to admit you weren’t really expecting success or you didn’t know what you were getting into; after all if you were expecting success you clearly overestimated yourself or underestimated the challenge before you.

 

 

Regroup. Reevaluate. Pick yourself up. Carry on. Try again.

 

At times, you may need more than a passerby to encourage you. You may need a partner or teammate to give you the confidence, accountability, or even a complimentary skillset to continue well as you follow. Hopefully, though, you are doing really well and a partner or teammate may be the one who needs you! Be on the lookout for like-minded followers and journey together while you can. I'll be looking for you on the lanes!