Umpiring Life—Cutting Through the Do’s and Don’ts

By Sri Harold Klemp

About three Saturdays ago I attended a Bobby Sox softball game in which my daughter was playing. Up in the stands were the usual smattering of parents, sitting and chatting, having a good time. Next to me was a lady attempting to set her watch. She said she had just bought it. She worked at setting the watch for an hour and a half.

Watching her struggling with the watch and trying to read the instructions that kept being blown away by the wind, I thought she must have lost her mind from raising two children. At one point I asked, “Do you need the watch?” “No,” she said, pointing to her wrist, “I have a watch, but I have to learn to set this one sometime.” So I continued to watch her work at her creative plan.

I soon realized she hadn’t lost her mind at all. She was actually using time to learn (the hard way) how the watch worked. She had nothing better to do during most of the game. As we talked, I found that she was a very perceptive person. She worked in an office and was very competent. She’d sit for an hour and a half watching her kid play ball while trying to learn how to set the watch. She was growing, she was watching her children grow, and she was fulfilled in her own way.

We talked about a number of things. I said to her, “You’re a single parent now, you’re working, and you’ve got two daughters in their preteens. How do you raise your children? How do you handle all of it?”

“With drugs and so many other things going on out there,” she said, “the simplest thing I can tell my children—without giving them a whole bunch of rules like the Ten Commandments, which they wouldn’t listen to—is this: If what you do doesn’t hurt somebody else, it’s all right.” This was the rule that she made for her children. It cut through a lot of do’s and don’ts about what was right and what was wrong. Each time they faced a situation, they had to become thinking individuals who had to make a decision by saying, “I can either do this or I can’t, depending upon whether or not it will cause needless injury to someone.” This is not to say that if someone attacks you, you can’t defend yourself. It simply means not causing needless injury in the normal course of life.

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An easy spiritual touchstone you can share with your children is Maybury’s Two Laws:

(1) Do all you have agreed to do, and

(2) do not encroach on other persons or their property.

Sri Harold shares Maybury’s Two Laws in The Spiritual Laws of Life and even recommends that we “Learn each word by heart, because knowing and using these two laws as a guiding principle in your daily life will avoid a lot of extra, unnecessary karma.”