enough, he did. If he was batting and he had a dead-easy shot pitched to him, all that was needed was
for someone to call out, “Joe will miss it,” and his bat would somehow swing wrong and hit a foul
ball to the sound of someone’s excited cry, “How’s that?”
It is probably little wonder that Joe began to doubt himself. He felt reluctant to do things. He
was scared that if he tried something it would go wrong and he would hear those dreaded words
again. He began to think that he was no good at ball games and he started to use every ploy he could
to avoid participating in team sports at school. When he had to do sports, he chose individual activ-
ities like running and swimming, where he was not so likely to be put down yet again—at least not
by a whole team.
It was not until he got to high school that Joe began to discover things could be different from
what they had been. Some of his friends decided to form a lacrosse team and asked Joe to join them.
“No, I’m no good at ball sports,” came his quick reply. They answered, “Neither are we. None of us
have ever played before. We’re all in the same boat.” When he still declined, they pressed him. “We
know how good you are at running, and we need a good runner.”
Joe reluctantly gave in to their pressure and, to his own surprise—while learning from scratch
with his friends—he found he could run and play a ball game at the same time. They all fumbled a
bit at first, struggling to catch or scoop up the ball in their rackets. And Joe found he was not much
worse than anyone else. They practiced as a team twice a week and Joe even practiced in his back-
yard almost every day, without telling the others. In their first competitive game, Joe surprised him-
self by being the first to score a goal. Their coach was excited. Joe became their hero and found that,
not only could he do it, he enjoyeddoing it.
You see, there was something that Joe did not realize at the time when people used to say, “Let
Joe do it.” He was young and growing up. You have to learnto turn on a tap so that it doesn’t rush
out too fast. You cannot necessarily expect to be perfect the first time—or even at all the later times—
you try to do something. You have to learnhow to hold a plate so that it doesn’t slip from your fin-
gers when you’re washing or drying up. You have to learnhow to judge the right distance and speed
to move your arm when picking up a glass of water. Joe didn’t know this because everyone around
him was bigger than he and had already learned how to do those things. He just expected—as every-
one else seemed to expect—that he should be as good as they were.
He hadn’t realized when he was playing softball on summer vacation that his father and uncle
and cousins were all older and physically more mature than he was. Joe was the youngest and, con-
sequently, you really couldn’t expect him to be as skilled as they were in managing the coordination
between his eyes and hands, could you? But as he grew up he became as equally capable of doing the
sorts of things they could do. Maybe not all of those things, but certainly some of them. Maybe he
could even learn to do things that they couldn’t do.
He doesn’t often hear people say “Let Joe do it” anymore. On those few occasions when he does,
however, he is able to smile to himself and think, “Yeah, that’s just part of growing up.”
CARING FOR YOUCaring for Yourself 69