Longshot

A field goal crossbar is the same height as a basketball hoop. That’s meaningless information unless you are a kid who wants to kick field goals, doesn’t have goal posts in the yard, but does have a basketball hoop.

I was that kid.

I was never going to play football. For one, I had a seizure disorder, which precluded me from playing contact sports, but besides that, the more realistic limitation was that I was small. Short and skinny. If I had a football career, I imagine it would consist largely of being tackled, not of tackling.

Regardless, I was a teenage boy in the Midwest, and I wanted to play. So, I felt I had two options: waterboy, or field goal kicker. I opted for trying to become a kicker.

Consistently Bad

My dad and I built a little tee to hold the football for me, and I marked out different spots in my yard for where an extra point attempt would be, 25-yarder, etc. And I kicked. 

I kicked after school. On the weekends. With friends or by myself. I was out there kicking. Thousands of kicks.

Despite my efforts, my kicks weren’t very consistent. Well, I suppose they were—consistently bad. I didn’t kick very straight. And they weren’t very far. At all. They were embarrassingly not far. They’d often land in my mom’s dogwood tree or dangerously close to the windows. 

I was a kicking menace. 

But every once in a while I’d get a hold of one. High arc, good distance (for me at least). And man, that felt good. So I’d kick more. 

The more I kicked, the more I liked kicking. Not because I was good at it, but because I stopped caring if I was good or not.

The Unambiguous Outcome

Somewhere relatively early in my kicking adventures it became clear that I wasn’t going to be a field goal kicker. Not due to lack of effort—I practiced harder at it than I did at most other things as a sixteen-year-old. But it just wasn’t in the cards. It was out of my reach.

I kept kicking anyway, and not because I thought if I just worked hard enough I’d get there. It wasn’t persistence. It was a genuine mental shift that allowed me to keep kicking despite knowing I wasn’t any good.

I didn’t choose to detach from my goal, or stop caring about the outcome of my kicks, but the unambiguous outcome of my kicks changed my relationship with kicking. I wasn’t good at it, but I still liked doing it.

The goal was gone, but my affection for the activity remained. 

Not a Decision

There’s a difference between deciding not to care about results and arriving there. When a goal becomes unreachable, that’s not always because the effort wasn’t there. Sometimes the constraints were invisible until you were deep enough in to see them. You simply couldn’t have known from the outside.

But what if along the way you’ve come to enjoy the process? Is it practical to keep working if the goal is unattainable? If not, does that matter? Does it have to be useful?

When the activity stops being about progress, maybe the mind lets us reorganize the effort around enjoyment. Not through force, but because there’s nothing else to do with it. Stop doing it, or find a new reason. 

Saturday Afternoons

At some point, you’ve probably been told to “enjoy the process”. But that’s not easy if significant obstacles exist between you and your goal. Reflecting on my field goal kicking “career” made me realize that enjoyment might emerge as a downstream effect, not where we begin. In my case, it was forced detachment from the goal. Not by me, but by reality. 

When the goal drifts out of reach, that can feel like defeat, but it can also be a chance to redefine our relationship with the effort. My sixteen-year-old self had to accept that I wouldn’t be out there under the Friday night lights, but there was a pretty good chance I’d be out there in my front yard kicking away on Saturday afternoon.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m truly happy you’re here. 

All the best,

Nate