I remember losing a close game of basketball about
twenty-five years ago that ended with a very “iffy” foul call, resulting in
some free throw shots that allowed the opposing team to pull ahead in the
closing seconds. As we walked back to the bench after the buzzer, my teammates
and I lamented that “bad call” that we felt cost us the game. Our coach then
asked us why we allowed the outcome of the game to be decided by someone who
was not even playing. His point was we had just played an hour and a half of
basketball, the game should not have come down to a last-second call.
Most of us have a referee in life. This isn’t necessarily
the person who makes the rules for us, nor is it someone who’s dressed up like
a zebra. No, the referee is the person/condition/circumstance/political party/etc.
we blame when things in life go awry instead of taking ownership for the
mistakes we made. Many of us “need” a Ref, because otherwise we must face the
horrors of owning our own mistakes and taking responsibility for our life and
our decisions.
It is too easy to point the finger at others, especially
when we feel we have been dealt a bad hand or treated unfairly, rather than
look at our actions that placed us in that position in the first place. I still
believe that Ref made the wrong call two-and-a-half decades ago. But I also
realize, to my coach’s point, that it was the mental errors, the turnovers, the
bad shots, the lazy defense – all the things my team and I controlled – that
resulted in us only being up by a single point in the closing seconds of the
game. It was our own actions that made us vulnerable to the judgment call of a
third party – something we had no control over. We lost the game because of
many of our own poor decisions, yet we blamed it all on the Ref because of a
single mistake of his.
We need to quit blaming the Ref. Yes, we all experience bad
calls in life. But we cannot allow those to define us and take away our own
agency by allowing others to determine our outcomes. There always have been and
always will be striped donkeys in your life blowing whistles and passing judgments
on you, but it is your life. Do not let them decide whether you win or lose.
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