Keeping Up vs Keeping Tabs
I’m a baseball fan. Perhaps it’s because I played it as a kid — a left-handed kid at that.
Now that I’m a left-handed adult I can look back and recognize that one of the appealing elements of playing baseball for me was that there’s a certain role that left handed players feel that right handed players don’t feel nearly as well. So while I wasn’t that good at baseball, I was good enough considering I was left-handed.
All that said, I don’t watch a lot of baseball. The major league season is 162 games long — and that doesn’t even count the postseason. That’s a lot of baseball — and a lot of time.
Games are taking longer to play. The piece of the game is slow down a bit. And if you are loyal to a team, then you’d be spending a lot of time — pretty much every day during the season — watching games.
Keeping up with one team — let alone an entire league — is a fool’s errand. The season is so long and unless you are highly invested in the game, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I used to try to keep up with baseball — and other sports that had long seasons like hockey and basketball — but it meant that I was sacrificing something else. And the thing I was sacrificing was something (or some things) that I had more direct control or command over.
Now I focus on just keeping tabs on the season, particularly what happens with my team. I don’t need to watch every game. I can pick and choose. If my team makes the postseason, then that’s where I will increase my investment of time, energy, and attention.
This strategy of keeping tabs vs. keeping up can be applied to plenty of other areas in our lives. The news is one area, social media is another. Television shows might even fall into this category, especially if you aren’t watching them as they first get released. I’m sure you can think of others, too.
I’m tired of keeping up with things that I have no control over — things that move on whether I’m with them or not. It’s just not a wise investment of my time to keep up with so much. I’d much rather keep up with the things I know will have a direct impact on me in a positive manner, and keep tabs on the things that I either enjoy following or know that I should be aware of in the grand scheme of things.
So that’s what I’m going to do. Care to join me?
