The Useless Tree

Herb Score and Chuang Tzu

An obituary today brought to mind the uncertainty of Way, how, in a moment, the trajectory of our lives can change.  Herb Score was a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians in the 1950's.  He was strong and promising and destined, it seemed, for greatness.  Then a line drive smash hit him in the face.  He never regained his power, he gradually faded from the game, though he went on to a long career in broadcasting.  His experience is a reminder to all of us that Tao moves in ways we cannot fathom.  Chuang Tzu puts it nicely:

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movements of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing one into another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we'll never calibrate  what drives them.  So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder our spirit's treasure-house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you'll never lose your joy. And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you'll invest all things with spring. (75)

    And it appears that Score, in coming to terms with his lost chances, did not allow his bad luck to steal his joy.  He rolled with it:

In May 1997, on the 40th anniversary of his injury, Score was asked
to reflect on that moment. He chose not to dwell on the hard luck.

“I’ll be married 40 years in July,” he told The Plain Dealer. “That’s the only anniversary I think about.”

Maybe we can all learn from that.

Herbscore

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