Wanna Be Like Mike?

Do you remember the slogan? At the height of Michael Jordan's career many of us wanted to be like Mike. We were in awe of his incredible skills, but perhaps even more his limitless desire to win. We had the same fascination with Tiger, didn't we? Yet, from a spiritual perspective, don't we mind competitiveness? Should we just make an exception for professional sports? How do we square the circle?

Aggressiveness is not the problem. The universe expanded with infinite force during the Big Bang. We are part of it, so why shouldn't we be forceful when necessary. Being one of a kind  is also not a problem. We all are. Every child of God is the missing piece to the overall puzzle - creation would be incomplete without us. Competition is the problem - the notion that we have to get what is ours at the expense of someone else. Professional sports is designed by the human mind as a zero sum game for entertainment purposes. The Tao follows a very different rule book that is ours to discover instead.

What Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods can teach us is that limitless will power to rise to every occasion. A spiritual journey is not a stroll in the park. Monsters of our own making will pop up and we have to face them one by one. If we don't flinch and keep on marching despite them, they have no power over us and will leave us in peace. Everything else is indeed a stroll in the park. The Tao gives us little nudges along the Way and indeed very little effort is needed to proceed. Where others have friends, foes and business partners we only have friends. Let's thank Mike and Tiger for showing us what incredible things we can accomplish when we set our mind on it. We don't need to aspire to be like them, we have the Tao to turn to instead. And our journey can be as magical as theirs.