It's red because it's almost there

Archery is a tricky business for me. I am historically someone that has difficulty doing things consistently, so for me, archery is a way to practice consistency and discipline without being under the stress of a competitive environment. For the first few volleys yesterday, I was fiddling with a new brace height and was, as I expected, was shooting wide and imprecise. 

For an arrow to fly straight, you need the stars to align.  Keep your back straight and your head forward, keep your bow arm locked but not gripping the bow, bend your fingers to just the right angle, pull all the way back, and don't forget to exhale.  If your bow is, then, tuned well enough, your arrow will fly true, but it takes an enormous amount of practice to get to the point where tuning matters.  The skill in archery is not to just hit the bullseye once: it must be hit every single time.  So, when you get flustered and impatient, you slack off and forget to pull back the whole way, and the arrow flies short, or you tweak the bow and it veers to the side.

Psychologically, I went into last night's session dejected, having been empirically proven to be bad at the office sport, ping-pong, once again.  The infuriated, childish side of me wanted to prove that I am, for once and forever, "bad at consistency".  So I fired a million shitty volleys in an attempt to prove it.

Then, something interesting happened: I got tired of trying to prove myself right.

I frequently tend to look for "that fundamental problem" when analyzing my character, and I thought that the fundamental problem was an inability to do things consistently.    I realized I was simply being childish, and that the reality of the situation was that there probably existed several problems I had to tackle, and that none of them would get tackled if I did not set a precise goal to achieve. 

I thought my goal was to "hit the bullseye," initially. The problem with this goal was that I did not actually *know* how to hit the bullseye, and thus would make wild guesses with no focus.  The new goal was simple: I would put a pin in the bale, and my new goal would be to aim at the pin.  Not to plant the arrow in the pin, but to put the tip of my arrow on the pin before I let it fly.  This is something I knew how to do.  I may have still struggled adjusting the other variables, but having a concrete point of focus before triggering the "heat of the moment" that comes with shooting the arrow gave me something that I knew how to improve.

And improve I did, having fired a few back-to-back tight groups before fatigue finally set in.  I guess the moral of the story is probably something about not counting yourself out when you can't get something right the first time, and something about setting reasonable goals for yourself. 

The lesson I've learned today, incidentally, is that writing introspective blog posts is hard and rambly and oh god I have wasted so much time on this it's time to just publish and move on (I sure hope nobody reads this it's sooo baaaad)