2010 Sports Writing Part 1: Human Sacrifice

In professional sports, athletes trade their physical gifts for a lot of money. The grueling schedules these athletes play to create the revenue to pay their salary inevitably takes a toll on their bodies. The perils of football have been particularly well documented recently – the repetitive head trauma involved in being an offensive lineman, for example, makes raging, demented fifty-year-old infants out of our most statuesque giants – but can be found across all of the big four (NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL). Hockey players get concussed and lose their teeth, baseball players have messed up hormones and snap their tendons, and basketball players eventually blow out their knees. It alleviates the pain caused by the suspicion that I am wasting my valuable life force by living.

Problem and Solution

I woke this morning to thunder and lightning and the feeling that today is a good day to write. The following is involving and self-involved. Beware.

I am not yet a writer. Carried along by the tides of circumstance and inspiration I have written things. But if I hope to sustain my physical existence with words (a fantastical notion when framed like this) then I damn well better learn how to do it practically, not just therapeutically (as a technique for equalizing the psychological humours), and doing it practically requires making a practice of it, which requires being able to do it when I don't want or need to, which requires being able to will it. And for me, that requires knowing why and how it is that I have come to be doing this thing in particular. Which brings us to one of my favourite locations of personal pondering:

How does one know how one knows what to do? We can pick a highest value, and proceed from there. We can become a chameleon, and adopt the values around us so as to know with a sense of belonging. We can live a day at a time, a decision at a time, never knowing how we know, respecting and loving the mysterious place from whence that comes. But if all highest values seem pallid? And if we gag at the world around us? And if then, too, we find that we do not only not know how we know, but we do not know at all? It becomes awfully complicated to decide what to have for breakfast (and without breakfast it becomes awfully hard to write).

The solution is to just do it, whatever it is. And if the act of knowing is the veritable pretzel of angst petrified in the above paragraph, then decide what to do by deciding nothing and doing something; eventually life will have happened and is just as likely to have been happy, significant and productive as a willfully determined life, which is bound to fail and stray. We humans are creative; the rightness will follow the doing. But I do not want to give up on the idea that I am special, that I have a particular gift and my life’s work is to make sure it gets shared (which might be the same as saying I don’t want to grow up (all prophets are children, and all children are going to save the world)).

The solution is still to just do it, whatever it is. And if you don’t know what it is, and you don’t know how to know what it is, and if you don’t know how to know how to know what it is, then the solution is definitely to just do it. And if you’re framing it in terms of not knowing whether or not it is a particular thing, like writing, then that is probably the thing to just do. So that is why I wrote this today.