I always considered myself to be winning at life.
I’d played by my own rules, convinced that I knew it all.
Convinced that I had all the answers and that I was free to just make things up as I went.
Oh, how naïve I was.
One day I came to realize that I hardly knew anything at all
I came to understand that this world we live in,
Seen or unseen, has some rules.
A cosmic structure that you and I are both subject to whether we like it or not.
I came to see that I had essentially chosen to go to war with nature, with my own nature, and I wasn’t winning at all.
My experience with athletes taught me that if you want to win, you must play the game hard, but you must always play by the rules.
You prepare for the rules
You develop skills to give yourself an advantage
But you always accept and work within all the limitations that are placed upon you.
You don’t rewrite the rules, it’s you that must adapt.
Life is very much the same way,
But we don’t really seem to understand the limitations we must work within
Because these are constantly being redefined by man.
We don’t want to play by someone else’s rules
Instead we want to question everything and make up our own.
We call it freedom.
And although your will to choose is and should always be free, you’re not free to recreate the whole universe in your own image – you simply can’t, we can’t.
Because the laws of nature are unchanging and they apply to everyone just the same.
So you either learn to play by the rules or you opt out of life completely
Because there is no other game in town.