"Recognize that life is what you get when you're born ... living is what you do with it."  *-- Jim Allen

"Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do."  *-- Voltaire

"The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little 'extra'."  *-- Jimmy Johnson 

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Recently I was in Cleveland, Ohio, about two thousand miles from my home in southern California, visiting my brother and his family. My sister-in-law and I took my eight-year-old niece to her first baseball game, where we saw the Cleveland Indians host the Minnesota Twins. We had excellent seats behind home plate, and little Caitlin loved the music, the “wave,” and everything about her first ballpark experience. Of course, it was even better when she saw her home team defeat the visitors 2-1.

I’m no baseball expert but I can say that this game wasn’t what you’d call an outstanding display of hitting. Few times did either team manage to get more than four batters up per inning. Both teams scored a run in the third inning, and it was the bottom of the eighth inning before we saw another score. Cleveland had loaded the bases with two out. Designated hitter Travis Hafner took one ball, one strike…and got hit by a pitch. Which meant he automatically went to first base, all the runners advanced, and Ronnie Belliard trotted home for the winning run. No heroics, no big hit, no dramatic, crash-into-a-wall missed catch. But an errant pitch that wasn’t enough to hurt the batter, but was enough to allow him to win the game for his team.

By the way, for those of you who don’t speak baseball, bear with me just a moment…

Did Hafner dream about getting hit by a pitch? Not likely. He’s a designated hitter—his purpose on the team is to step in and hit the ball, not have the ball hit him! But if you think about it, is his purpose really to hit the ball? Or is it to win the game? If you put it in that perspective, then he did exactly what he was supposed to do. He won the game for his team. It may not have been his preferred means, but he accomplished his end. A win is a win in the final tally.

When you’re working on manifesting your goals, what are we focusing on? Are we thinking about the means, or the end? It’s one thing to think, “I need money,” knowing you need it to buy a new car, and another to focus on “I need a new car.” Is it really the money we want to manifest, or is it the car? Maybe we win the car in a lottery. Maybe we inherit it from a long-lost uncle. But we have the new car, and it wasn’t the money we were after anyway.

It’s not up to us to determine the “how”; the universe is smarter than we are, and will do that for us. We need to look clearly for the “what,” and trust that the universe, the Divine, can handle the “how”, that is what you need when you're manifesting your goals.

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