I spend about a third of each month at our place in Scottsdale, Arizona. I love the Arizona climate. It seems that as each year passes I become more enamored with the warmth of the Arizona sun than the cold Alberta winters. And I get to play golf year round. There are literally hundreds of great golf courses to play in the Phoenix area and I do not belong to one club. With my flexible schedule I often play at different times and at quite a variety of courses. This means I often show up at a course as a single player and get placed with one to three other players. I consider this a wonderful opportunity to meet other golfers (and in some cases, potential client prospects).
On this past trip I did the usual and walked on to one of the local courses in as a single and got placed with a man named Rueben. Rueben is an aging black man with steel wool type gray hair sticking out from under his ball cap. He looked old to me and I later received confirmation that Rueben just turned 80 years old. Imagine the story I made up about the man I just got paired up with. He instantly gave me a sense of being a nice, kind man with a glowing smile and bright eyes. But I was mostly concerned with his ability to keep up with the group ahead of us and even more importantly, which set of tees he wanted to play from. I usually like to play the back tees, or as I age myself, maybe the next set up. Would I need to play the forward tees to accommodate the kind old man? As we came up to the first tee I stopped and asked Rueben which set of tees he preferred. To my surprise he asked if it was OK if we played from the back tees (the tips in golf talk). We stepped up to the tee box and Rueben hit a beauty right down the middle. If not for dumping a shot in the water and taking a bogey on the 18th Rueben would have scored an 80 (shooting his age) for the round. He played wonderfully and was a joy to spend the afternoon with. He told me he played 210 rounds last year! So much for wondering if this old man could keep up!
I believe the game of golf is much like life when it comes to relationships. Think about the stories we make up when we first meet someone. What about the stories they make up about us? I wonder what stories Rueben made up about me. And of course, I had my own performance anxiety as I stepped up to the first tee with my newfound friend watching. I had a pretty good score this time and couldn’t help make up stories of what Rueben would think if I had hacked the ball around the course. Consider the opportunities we may have lost over the course of our lifetimes because we made up stories about people the instant they crossed our paths. We then discount someone as not worthy of our time or energy and move on to the next possibility.
What if we considered:
• Everyone we encounter as worthy of our time,
• Someone we could learn from,
• A credible human being with their own unique gifts,
• Someone we would minimally get as much from as we would give to them.
I would encourage all of us to upgrade our level of tolerance for others and to live in a higher place of abundance and care. Then may all the stories we make up be positive about others and prove to be true. Here’s to all the beautiful Rueben’s in the world!
