Spiritual Sportsmanship?

With the start of baseball season already here, let's look at our spiritual journey in similar terms. After all, most people consider it their solemn duty to finish first, if not in speed, at least by creating everything in life they want.

So what do we do? We pretty much grab everything we can. But the problem is that getting it doesn't usually bring us happiness. Because even if we succeed, we quickly tire of our victory, and want something more.

To boot, most of us go about it like bulls in the proverbial china shop, running roughshod over anything that gets in our way. Maybe we'll make a half-hearted effort to moderate our bullishness around those we profess to love. But even then, many of our interactions are contests of will and desire.

If we're not satisfied when we win, maybe we're playing the wrong game. Or at least by the wrong set of rules.

Perhaps the object of the game of life is not in getting or doing anything, and those desires that lead us around by our noses have a deeper purpose than our personal satisfaction. Perhaps the object is something else altogether.

After all, beneath these three-dimensional shells are spiritual beings gathering those experiences. And spiritual beings probably don't have much use for dollars or cars or jobs or anything else, other than for the experiences they're used to create.

Granted, learning to create the lives we want may reflect an ability to play by the rules of the external, material world. But they don't say much about what we've learned on a spiritual level.