Ideal Bowling

I went bowling the other night.

Midweek get-togethers with friends are a nice way to break up a work week. Bowling is a challenge for me. It’s difficult just picking up spares but feels like it should be much easier. On the first roll I knock down about half the pins. The second is even more embarrassing. It doesn’t matter how they’re lined up either. Pins on opposite sides of the lane are nearly impossible to hit. Most people can get one but without a bouncing the pin off the back and striking the other one, forget it. Have you ever seen anyone actually do that? Nail a perfect 7, 10 split?

When I have three pins staring at me all lined up down the center I’ll miss to one side or the other. If the pins are clustered on one edge I’ll just miss by rolling past the side or clunking it in the gutter. My favorite is when two pins are standing up with a bowling ball size gap between them. I make a selection on which one to hit and miss both pins going right between them.

It makes me think of the boat chase scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

“Are you crazy don’t go between them!”

“Go between them are you crazy?!”  

No matter how wide the miss I always manage to stare at the cleanup gate like I’ve just seen an elephant knock them over with his trunk. It’s partly confusion and partly surprise, Why? How? Bowling is no different from every other activity. In order to get good you have to spend time at it. On a good year I’ll go twice, so I won’t be getting better anytime soon. Bowling, pool and darts are just games you play at the bar or at birthday parties or on a snow day from school. Obviously some people compete in them like any other sport, but for most of us these are occasional events. We can only …ahem, spare so many hours every year. Mostly I just think WAAAAY too much about the larger implications; hence this blog.

That I get too frustrated with my ability is a given; why I get so frustrated is a mystery. I’m not the kind of person that needs to be good at everything all the time. I’m as competitive as most guys but I think I have a standard idea in my head of what the performance level should look like. Let’s call it “Ideal 1”. It’s an artificial level that exists in my head representing my expected game. Ideal 1 doesn’t measure my actual ability, it’s pure fiction. It isn’t rooted in past efforts or realistic notions. How I arrived at this level is anyone’s guess.

You’ll understand this feeling if you’ve ever watched the US Open and thought “I should be able to do that”. Of course you don’t mean “I should be able to do that” at the same level and Rafael Nadal or Roger Federer.” You just mean I could volley the ball back and forth over the net, no problem. But it is a problem. A very big problem. What you should ask yourself in reply to the silly assertion is “Based on what, should I be able to do that?”

 Anything short of Ideal 1 is failure, which is tough on the psyche. It’s not a competitive thing as much as an expectation; again, for a game which I don’t play often and have almost no knowledge of. I don’t expect to get over 200 and if the highest score of the group is 175 and at 145, I’m OK with that. But those sub 100 games are embarrassing even if the top scores are only a few points above that. Ideal 1 doesn’t come with an exact score number which is convenient because then I’d have to name it.    

What is that mechanism in my thinking that makes me imagine a world where lofty expectations are the norm, based on nothing?

There is good news however. It seems to lessen with age. I’ll bet it never goes away completely though. I can make fun of myself a little more now.

Life is basically a collection of moments like my ill imagined bowling expertise. We think we have some notion of how it goes until we start to play, start to work, start to raise kids and start to save and invest money. Suddenly it all starts to seem unfair and we wonder why we aren’t better at this? ‘I’ve watched others do it and it doesn’t seem that tough’ is a kind of unspoken rule. I didn’t expect the setbacks or the debt. I didn’t expect the illness or the lack of opportunity. I thought education would ensure a better buffer.

But everyone who stays at it improves, with effort and with learning. That may be the only truly observable lesson. Stay in the game, even when you struggle with the wobbly pins.