Life Hands You
Curve Balls.
Here Is How
You Always Hit.
Most people are not derailed by the curve ball itself. They are derailed by the expectation that it should not have arrived. This week — Sam Harris in a café, Marcus Aurelius in a private notebook, and what a dislocated shoulder during the CrossFit Open taught me about momentum.
You know the feeling. Everything is moving. The week is in order. You have a plan.
And then something happens. A person you relied on walks out the door. An injury sidelines you at the worst possible time. A project falls apart on the day it was supposed to launch.
And your first instinct — be honest — is some version of: why does this keep happening to me?
What if that is the wrong question entirely?
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.20
Sam Harris — a thinker I find genuinely worth spending time with — shared a story recently that stopped me. He was sitting in a café with a friend, overwhelmed. A Twitter storm had broken around something he had said. His commute that morning had gone wrong. He was in that familiar spiral — the tone of someone who feels like the world keeps adding to the pile.
His friend listened. Then asked one question.
“Did you actually think that one day you would wake up and simply have no more problems?”
Harris said it landed like cold water. Not cruel. Clarifying. Because the honest answer was yes. Somewhere underneath the rational surface of his thinking, that was exactly what he had been assuming. That problems were interruptions. That the default state of a well-managed life was smooth.
“Our actions may be impeded — but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.”
— Marcus Aurelius, MeditationsMarcus Aurelius — one of the most powerful men who ever lived — spent nineteen years as Emperor in near-constant war, a devastating plague, betrayal from his closest allies, and a co-emperor who was incompetent and corrupt. And every night he sat down and wrote private journal entries reminding himself that the obstacle is not the interruption of the work. The obstacle is the work.
He never published those notes. He wrote them because he needed to hear it again. Every day. That is how hard the reframe is. Even for Marcus Aurelius.
Last year I dislocated my shoulder in the second week of the CrossFit Open. The five weeks of the year where you test everything you have been building. Gone in week two.
Week three I still showed up. My arm was essentially hanging. It hurt. But I could not not be there. The weeks after — no jumping, no running. Everything I normally used to train, to coach, to feel like myself was off the table.
I had a choice. Treat it as a waiting room until the real training could resume. Or focus on what I could do — however modified, however far from where I had been.
It is now May. Twenty-five days straight. Fifty push-ups every day. That is not a dramatic comeback. That is just what happens when you refuse to stop — even when stopping would have been completely reasonable.
“The shoulder didn’t end the momentum. It changed what momentum looked like for a while.”
The problem is almost never the curve ball itself. The problem is the expectation that it should not have arrived. When we expect smooth, every disruption feels like evidence that something is wrong with us or wrong with the plan. We start over. We tear up the programme. And we carry a low-level exhaustion from constantly being surprised by the normal friction of a life in motion.
But when you update the expectation — when you genuinely accept that problems are not interruptions but the actual texture of a real life — something shifts. The curve ball arrives and instead of asking why, you ask what. What is available to me right now. What can I do with what I have today.
Gratitude is part of this. Not the poster-on-the-wall kind. The practice of actively naming what is still intact when something breaks. Not to minimise what is hard. To keep the hard thing in proportion.
The human brain under stress narrows. It sees the problem and nothing else. Gratitude is the deliberate act of widening the frame again. Marcus Aurelius did it every night in a private notebook for nineteen years. If the most powerful man in the world needed that practice, so do you. So do I.
Tonight — write down three things that are still intact. Not aspirations. Not goals. Things that exist right now, that the curve ball has not touched. Your health if you have it. A relationship that is holding. Work that still has meaning. Something small from this week that was genuinely good. Do not perform gratitude. Just look at what is still there. And notice how the problem you walked in with looks slightly different when it is surrounded by everything else.
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