By Glenn Dromgoole

When my daughter Janet was ten, she suggested one day that we go over to the nearby elementary school and shoot baskets. She was just learning how to play basketball, and it was a beautiful day. So off we went.

The school was better than the park, she said, because the school had eight-foot goals as well as the standard ten-foot goal. A ten-year-old is not much of a match for a ten-foot goal.

But when we arrived at the school, the eight-foot court was occupied. Not by ten-year-olds, but by a group of young men who were having quite a time slam-dunking the short hoop.

My ten-year-old was disappointed. The tall people, she said, should shoot at the tall goal and let the short people use the short goal.

As it turned out, the young men were most gracious. As soon as they saw her coming, they moved over to the regulation court and left her the eight-foot basket.

But I noticed that as soon as we left, they were back over on the eight-foot court, slam-dunking and pretending they were pro basketball seven-footers.

I thought about how that’s the way we live life too often – shooting at the short goal, doing what comes easy rather than taking aim at a higher goal that requires more skill and effort and patience. 

The real challenge in life comes not from the short goals that are easy to reach but from higher goals – harder goals – that require us to work, to polish our skills, to reach beyond ourselves.

Tall people, the ten-year-old said, should shoot at the tall goals. Something to think about as we begin a new year.

Glenn Dromgoole is the author of 35 books, including Just Happy to Be Here and a collection of upbeat short stories, Coleman Springs USA. He and his wife Carol own Texas Star Trading Company in downtown Abilene.