You can’t outrun the ball.

When I was 8 years old I had a teddy bear hamster. His name was “General Grant”, you can do the math on that one. For those of you out of the know on childhood rodent ownership, the “teddy bear” hamster is a fluffier, more cartoon like and less rat looking than your everyday run of the mill stock hamster.

I would do the usual stuff with the General, push him around in toy cars, ramp him over telephone books, build him palatial estates out of Lincoln Logs… the usual. For exercise he had the obligatory spinning hamster wheel in his cage but he also had a clear plastic ball that we would put him in so he could run around the house in it. You’re free! Tearing ass across the carpet, slamming into corners or sliding at a breakneck pace across the dirty yellow linoleum kitchen floor. Now that I think about it, it’s almost as if he were trying to run away from the ball he was in. “If I run fast enough maybe I’ll slip this crystalline plastic prison and blow this popsicle stand for good.” He never ran fast enough to get out of the ball though. That plastic ball was his whole world and no matter where he went in the house, he would be in the middle of it. The ball would always be there. In front, behind, above and below.

I think we do the same thing with our lives sometimes. “If I run away from these circumstances fast enough or far enough, they’ll disappear.” That’s not how it works though, just ask General Grant. Wherever you go, there you are. We all try to escape things that make us uncomfortable or nervous or scared but these are usually the things that are the most profound transformers in our lives. The biggest opportunities for change or growth. Our lives come with us no matter where we go, just like the plastic ball. If only the General could have accepted that the ball was a friend and not a foe, his life would have been way more of a party. 

So maybe the answer isn’t to outrun the ball that we’re in but to expand it. To accept everything about it and realize that we are the ones who created it in the first place. It’s ours to amplify, to extend, to remodel or to shrink. Our consciousness itself is our plastic ball and it’s up to us how big we’re going to make it and how far across the carpet we’re going to run. Accept the ball and it disappears.