In a previous post, I introduced a lesson my father taught me years ago about paying attention to what’s happening around us.

It started on a Little League field, and at the time, it seemed like a simple instruction: keep your eye on the ball.

It turned out to be something more.

A Lesson from Right Field

Three factors influence how long and how well we live: genetics, health, and luck.

• We don’t control our genes.
• We have some control over our health.
• And luck, good or bad, often feels random.

But I’ve come to believe that luck isn’t entirely random. We can influence it at the margin. One of the simplest ways is by learning to see what’s actually happening around us.

I started learning that lesson when I was nine years old.

I was playing right field, the designated position for the weakest player on the team, in Little League. After watching me in a couple of games, my father decided I needed some help. His first instruction was simple: keep your eye on the ball.

That worked, up to a point.

One day, I watched a high fly ball all the way from the bat until it landed about fifteen feet away from me. I could easily have caught that ball.  I had done exactly what Dad said. And I had completely missed the play.

That’s when the lesson changed.

He told me it wasn’t enough to watch the ball. I needed to know where I was in relation to the ball at all times,  and to understand when and how I needed to move when it came my way. Then he added another layer: I needed to be aware of my teammates as well, where they were, and where they were in relation to the ball – and me, as well.

That was a lot for a nine-year-old. But over the course of that season, I began to internalize the lessons. By the end of the year, I had moved to first base, and I was starting to understand what he had really been teaching.

It wasn’t baseball.

Seeing the Whole Field

As I grew older, I saw the same lesson applied everywhere, hunting, fishing, driving, walking into a crowded room, crossing a street.

Most of us think we’re aware of our surroundings. In reality, we often focus on one thing, the “ball” and tune out everything else.

Situational awareness includes:

• Knowing where you are in relation to what matters
• Understanding how things are moving and changing
• Recognizing who and what else is part of the situation

When those come together, you begin to see more clearly.

Facilitating God Luck

We tend to think of luck as something that happens to us.

But more often, outcomes are influenced by small decisions made in real time.  We can sometimes influence our luck in positive ways.

Situational awareness doesn’t eliminate risk, but it shifts the odds.

In that sense, it facilitates good luck.

That sounds straightforward. In practice, it isn’t.

Because even when we’ve learned to see the whole field, it’s surprisingly easy to stop seeing it, especially in situations that feel familiar.

That’s where things begin to break down. I’ll come back to that next time in the second post on situational awareness: “When We Stop Seeing.”

As always, be well, and age gratefully.

Chris