Eye On The Ball

That's important, right? In tennis, and baseball, and life, if you don't keep your eye on the ball, you're unlikely to get a hit. Worse, you're likely to be hit. Hard.
 
The problem is, in tennis and in baseball, there's one ball at a time. In life, there are many. So, how exactly do you choose which ball your eye should follow at any given time? If you focus squarely on your career, doing your best where you're working or your cleverest when you're searching, you are likely to miss a school event or the test prep that you should have scheduled for your kids. If you choose to follow the "kids" ball, are you missing career opportunities that go flying right past you? And even if you choose the "kids" ball, it turns out that there are many. Have you chosen to watch the "kids and school and standardized tests" ball, or the "kids and health" ball? Or the "my kid's passion" ball? And clearly, each kid has a whole different set of balls to throw, so is your eye on Kid 1's or Kid 3's? Because you had better believe there are balls related to each whizzing past you at any given time.
 
I am not much of an athlete, but I have watched sports enough to know that I'm trying to watch a whole lot more balls than I would need to on a tennis court or a baseball field. It's clear that every day, we have to take our eyes off many to watch many others. There are surely days when we will swing at the wrong one. We just have to hope that more often than not, we'll be watching just the right ball at just the right time. So that we won't strike out or be hit really hard. And so that either we'll be walking in the right direction, or we'll have an out-of-the-park home run.