solitary man; he was, like so many of us in the modern world, an
island. He might have been famous, but he was a stranger to himself.
No one who reads about his endless affairs gets the sense that he was
enjoying it or that they brought him much pleasure. In fact, it almost
feels like he wanted to get caught. So he could get help.
We don’t need to judge Tiger Woods. We need to learn from him,
from both his fall and his long and valiant journey back to winning
the Masters in 2019 at forty-three years old with a fused back, with
his own young son cheering him on. Because we share the same
flaws, the same weaknesses—and have the same potential for
greatness, if we are willing to put in the work.
Marcus Aurelius would ask himself, “What am I doing with my
soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called
mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul? An
adolescent’s?... A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?”
We need to ask ourselves these questions, too, especially as we
become successful.
One of the best stories in Zen literature is a series of ten poems
about a farmer and his trouble with a bull. The poems are an allegory
about conquering the self, and the titles of each one map out the
journey that each of us must go on: We search for the bull, we track
the footprints, we find it, we catch it, we tame it, we ride it home.
At first the beast is untamable, it’s wild and impossible to contain.
But the message is that with struggle and perseverance, with self-
awareness and patience—with enlightenment, really—eventually we
can tame the emotions and the drives inside us. As one of the poems
reads:
Being well-trained, he becomes
naturally gentle.
Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.The narrator is in a state of serenity and peace. He has tamed his
wild spirit.
That’s what we’re trying to do. Since ancient times, people have
strived to train and control the forces that reside deep inside them so