With the sun setting and the rodeo winding down, I took out my camera and set off for the horizon line. After a few steps, I heard someone yell “JONNY!” from afar. Thinking this must be a mistake, I continued walking. “JONNY!” again. I turned around and couldn’t quite process who it was calling my name, in Colorado, in a setting I was myself surprised to be in. We approached each other and he re-introduced himself.
It was Ricky.
A few years back, my son and I were playing the Sand Box at Sand Valley. Ricky was the starter and made a comment about my Good Lion necklace; appreciating the kind word, I took it off and gave it to him.
Ricky went on to tell me that when we met, he had just moved to Wisconsin and was in a difficult season in life, feeling isolated and alone. When I gave him the necklace, he said he felt seen and noticed for the first time in a while and still keeps the necklace in his car as a reminder of his importance and value as a person.
Once he finished sharing, I promptly started crying. We hugged and I struggled to find words other than thank you, at which point, the rodeo ended and the gates flung open to release the horses back to the ranch, into the sunset, into the horizon.
When I went back to our group, I was a total mess. It was, and still is, impossible to explain how impactful those moments were on so many different levels.
Interestingly, the day prior, Michelle and I were talking about how bogus most metrics of “success” are. It has to be more than sales, clicks and the oh-so-enticing-comparison game. It has to be bigger than that. Maybe it’s simply and most profoundly, about impact which is innately difficult to measure. That moment at Rodeo Dunes crystalized all of it for me.
What the necklace represented was more than a gift. Unbeknownst and unwittingly, it had by grace, made an impact. And his words to me made an indelible impact.
To take it one step further, the backdrop for impact to occur is courage. It took courage for Ricky to yell my name and share all that he did; to make yourself known, wounds and all.
If you’re not yet aware, the entirety of Good Lion is a riff on a quote from Narnia.
“Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver, "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good.”
To grossly oversimplify, Lewis is decoupling safety from goodness and proposing a courage ultimately found outside of yourself. That is the why, the purpose and the importance of any of this: To make space for people who have felt overlooked, excluded, misunderstood and invisible; to step out of your comfort zone and embody courage.
Courage to hold onto hope.
Courage to not-conform.
Courage to keep moving forward.
Courage to be vulnerable; to forgive.
And if you’re a golfer, courage to play a game designed to pummel you.
That’s why this is all bigger than golf.
I don’t actually care how people dress on the course, if you love or hate golf, if you love or hate our gear. What I do care about is proposing a fuller, better way to engage yourself, others and the world around you; stiff-arming the ephemeral and always harkening back to what is eternal.
Forever GOOD > SAFE