There are many things in life that we wind up classifying as “a 9-iron”, that is, they “looked good from about 100-yards out.” If you can’t hit a golf ball 100-yards with a 9-iron, feel free to dig in your bag for whichever club will get you there. Or, just pick up the ball, walk it to the green, and drop it in the cup. You paid the green fees, do as you wish.

I’m a fairly even keeled person, but golf makes me angry, and paying to do something that makes me angry doesn’t seem all that logical, so I don’t golf much. Like many, I have a dusty set of golf clubs safely tucked away in the rafters of the garage, a remnant of a delusional past when I thought that one day I’d be good enough at the game that it wouldn’t make me angry. I was wrong. So it goes.

They say that we get upset about things when our expectations about those things are not met. As I creep, or creak, up on 50-years of life on earth, I’ve slowly learned that it is more productive to divert my attention away from the source of my ire, and turn that attention inward to curiously examine the expectations I had going in. Were those expectations reasonable or not? More often than not, they were not.

From a distance, perhaps 100-yards or so, we can’t quite see things all that clearly. Our brains aversion to ambiguity prompts it to fill in the blanks and provide us with an illusion of clarity. An illusion that can often leave us a bit disillusioned when we move in for a closer look. It’s hard to see the rust, dents, and cracked glass from 100-yards out. If you desire glorious perfection, or the illusion of such, keep your distance.

I encounter this quite often with my students. They often come to college with the idea that glorious perfection in life will be found in a certain vocation. They graduate from high school, choose a major, slide their 9-iron back in the bag, and start moving towards who they think they want to be and what they think they want to do.

Looks good from 100-yards out, but somewhere along that march towards glorious perfection, imperfections become visible, and they become disillusioned with the illusion of who they thought they wanted to be, and what they thought they wanted to do. It happens to all of us at some point during the pursuit of something in life. Most any “something”.

It can happen when we pursue happiness, when we pursue love, when we pursue meaning, when we pursue the world’s best cheeseburger, so on and so forth, but as Viktor Frankl once said, “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue.”

Conciliatory good news for the “glory bound and the beaten down”, as Canadian folk singer David Francey phrased it. For, despite the rust, dents, and cracked glass you realize upon arrival, something of use may ensue from the pursuit. Perhaps something better? Maybe not gloriously perfect, but more perfect for you.

Happy Thanksgiving. May an enjoyable gathering of family and friends ensue as a result of your pursuit of a gloriously delicious turkey and a fist full of lefsa. Ole Eastwood’s much celebrated adaptation of “A Fist Full of Dollars”.