Possessing Life

Cormac McCarthy once said, "You're just here once. Life is brief. And to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it." I have ached with the truth of those words at various times over the past year. On the one hand, I have come along way in just one short year: I went from being a brand new manager with the women's basketball team at Gardner-Webb, looking up to the coaching staff as my distant superiors, to working on that coaching staff as an underclassmen and coming to see myself as an equal. The work schedule to achieve that was grueling, to put it mildly. During the season, it was not uncommon for me to put in 60-70 hour work weeks. Pile thesis and assorted other classwork on top of that and you have the answer to why I was barely ever home for a solid six months. Even after the season, when there was little meaningful work to be done, full-time hours were still expected (in spite of the woefully part-time pay), all in the name of "not being outworked" by other staffs. And while it was not my decision, the time commitment of the coaching staff, it was my decision as to whether I would invest my time in that work.

Reading that McCarthy quote, after sitting at my desk for so long that morning and evening blurred into one another, I could not ignore it and continue. There are several other reasons that went into my decision, but just over two weeks ago, I walked into my boss's office and told him that I was resigning, effective May 31. I received a great deal of support from my family, my friends, and even my boss, who agreed that I needed to pursue my greater passions. Two days from now, I will work my last day at Gardner-Webb and I don't think I could be more excited. Not to be free of any kind of arduous labor, but simply to be free. To have a schedule that I set. Taking time, making time for the things that I find to be important or meaningful. It is a glad occasion, but thinking about it actually leaves me a bit sad. I cannot believe that I allowed so much of my time, so much of my life, to be dictated by the whims of others. Accomplishing tasks on their behalf that I have no passion for. And I am not just talking about my soon-to-be-former job. Among school, friends, and those everyday responsibilities that come with living, I allow so much of my time to be dictated for me.

This past Monday, Memorial Day, I woke up on my own at 9:30 (the time I usually report to the office) and did the usual making breakfast, coffee, waking up, etc. But then I did something unusual - I took my Eno hammock out in the back yard which my current bedroom faces. With only one sizable tree out there, I spent the better part of an hour climbing about its canopy, seeking a spot to hook up the two slap straps where there would be enough tension to actually sit in the hammock. I finally succeeded and rappelled down the tree to fetch a backpack full of books and notebooks. Twenty feet off the ground, swinging there in the open air, I read Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and just sat there. Suspended somewhere on the edge of time and space. Because I wanted to.

A wise man named Rob Bell points out in a book I used a good bit in my thesis called Drops Like Stars, that there is a fine distinction between ownership and possession. He uses the analogy of a guitar. Bell can play the guitar decently, but when it is in the hands of his friend who is a professional musician, sounds are evoked from the wood and strings that the author simply cannot create. Technically Rob Bell owns the guitar, but his friend possesses it in a way that Bell cannot. I have friends who own books and have read them, but I also have friends who possess those same books in ways that other do not. They swim in the words and drink them in, marinating until the truth of them seeps from their pores.

It is like this with life, I think. Each of us has a life, as long we are breathing and all of that. We are owners of life. But do we possess life? Do we evoke beauty from life that only we can conjure? Are we enough in tune with our own precise existence that its unique quality comes out? Given the brevity of life, it seems illogical to live any differently.

May you and I never be lemmings, spending our days slaving for the passions of others. May your days and my days be possessed, seized, lived like a song. Such is a life lived honestly.

North Charleston

I am writing at a table in the lobby of the Wingate Hotel, with about twenty minutes until we leave for shootaround at Charleston Southern's gym. Highlights from last night's Super Bowl are on the flat screen TV above the fake fireplace and a styrofoam cup of black coffee sits by my right hand. After an early breakfast and film session, all of us were faced with a rarity: several hours of downtime. After a relaxing couple of hours watching How I Met Your Mother (stewing for a large portion of the time about how I should be working on my thesis), I went for a run around Charleston Southern's campus (the hotel is essentially on campus, so it did not exactly take great feats of strength to run there). There is not a whole lot to it, to tell you the truth. It is flat, kind of spread out, dotted with buildings of a gold color that matches the sandy grass fields surrounding them, with the exception of the university's athletic fields, which are a manicured deep green.

I kind of liked it. The campus. There was something very appealing about it, its smallness, its intimacy. Strange because, measuring by the standards of college campuses across America, there is nothing there. As I ran past the soccer field and its makeshift mesh fencing, I thought that I might like to be a part of a campus like that. Not necessarily that one, but a small, overachieving university that does not look like much on the outside, but has substance beyond appearances.

The mood is different today. No longer defeated, despairing, and hopeless. As Coach told me one Sunday morning after a recent loss to Liberty, "the sun comes back up in the morning." I feel renewed. Maybe it was the run and the hot shower. Maybe it is the caffeine in this cup of coffee (a pretty decent one at that, considering it is in a styrofoam cup). Maybe it is just that, since the sun rises again, we have no choice but to eventually do likewise. Maybe it is that, as long as we have that fire within, we will find it in us to fight again, the embers glowing and igniting again when reason is found to do so. The Patriots, losers of the Super Bowl, eventually will. Probably not today. Probably not tomorrow. But eventually they will shake off what, for some of their players, is the greatest disappointment they have ever dealt with, and live to fight again.

Smokestacks in the Smoke

We are en route from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, South Carolina. Leaving a loss at Coastal Carolina University heading for Charleston Southern University, and hopefully a win. As our charter bus drove through Georgetown, South Carolina, we approached a large power plant. The metal sheeting of the building probably shined at one time, had since dulled under layers of coal dust particulates and the weathering of years of exposure. The buildings of this compound themselves seemed hollow as we passed on the right. Thin, slatted walls slapped around stairs and machinery. Slits revealed the inner workings of the beast below the smokestacks, coughing out a thin cloudstream. Two workers in hard hats and lime vests idled in the large doorways at the base entrances clogged with small bulldozers. Bright orange and blue signs adorned these doorways and numerous other strategic locations around the compound. Like a wasted minetown. Failing and floundering for breath, but giving the impression that it was a place you wanted to be.

We passed and came to a bridge over a river. To the right, another shinier power plant pumped smoke into the atmosphere with virility. The new metal gleamed the sun back to passerby. It lays riverside. I thought about the side of things that we don't see, how there is often a dark underbelly to all things seemingly good. Like power and electricity, even energy itself. To say nothing of money and labor.

Then I thought about the mood on the team bus today. About the hollow, empty feeling prevalent this morning. The silence that pervades everything. Everything that can be said has. There is only to try again tomorrow. Coming straight from church, the players wear matching custom-made sweatsuits, some of the coaches dress clothes. For some, the feeling inside does not match the external appearance. The general feeling seems to be that this is the social equivalent of putting a brightly colored sign on the dust coated wall of a dingy plant.

A Day of Rest

This is my first blog post not composed on a Travelynx bus on the way to a basketball game. Instead, I am at Broad River Coffee Company, killing time between classes on my one day off this week (oddly, a Wednesday). It is the one day of the week that I can avoid wearing sweats (especially matching sweatsuits, which look utterly ridiculous, a fact that the rest of my profession seems not yet to have realized) - I am actually wearing jeans, a blue checkered dress shirt, a similarly patterned orange tie, and a pair of sandals in celebration of the unseasonable warmth. I have been sitting at this wood table since Thesis class, working casually on my Cormac McCarthy project. My research has begun to spill over into physics, hence the need to stop reading and vent a bit. When you're going back and forth from criticism discussing Plato's Allegory of the Cave in light of The Road to the Bak-Sneppen Evolutionary Model, blogging is a solid and necessary coping mechanism.

As I look out the large front window of the BRCC, watching cars pass by, occasionally stopping at the single stoplight on Main Street, looking at the scraggly, gnarled January trees, the newly-refinished black roofs atop Gardner-Webb University's stately brick buildings, contrasting beautifully with the inexplicably green lawns, seeing nearly a dozen people I know in the hour and a half that I have been sitting here, conversing with one who I have not seen in over a month, picking back up where we left off, I recognize the charm of this place. And I am filled with supreme gratitude to have lived here. To have grown up here.

The Words of the Genius Inhabiting the Walls of a Travelynx Charter Bus

I have been thinking a great deal lately about inspiration, sparked by a brilliant talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert at a recent TED Conference. In it, she speaks of her "wild success," Eat, Pray, Love and the jarring likelihood that her greatest success, her best work, is behind her. She talks about the apparent propensity of writers to be alcoholic manic-depressives and how artists can brace themselves against this tendency. Saxon, during the talk, stated that he had never assumed writing or artistry to necessitate pain and suffering, the "tortured" existence. But I always have, even before the time I first thought about becoming a writer - such a belief has not deterred me in my desire to make writing my life's work. Gilbert hearkens back to ancient Greek and Roman ideas regarding artists and creative types. The Greeks, she says, believed that artists had daemons that helped them, which is a cool idea. But I prefer (as does Gilbert, presumably, as she devoted a large portion of her talk to it) the Roman conception that an artist had a genius residing in the walls of his studio, home, office, etc. feeding him inspiration. Artists had geniuses, in that understanding - they were not geniuses. And I love that. Because I am not a genius. Don't get me wrong, I think of myself as a very intelligent person and I strive to grow more so consistently. But I do not have some kind of secret insight into life or the way people are that others do not. I am a person, and a deeply flawed one at that, with a relentless desire to write. And so I ascribe to the idea that I am but a vessel, when I show up to my part of the job, a scribe for the divine spark, whatever it wants to express. Of course, the messages of that genius will reflect myself and my quirks, tendencies - the way I view the world. The spark, after all, must travel through my body, my mind, my filter.

I once read Donald Miller talking about the hundreds of coffee shops in Portland, Oregon, which he frequented for his writing sessions. He set a word-count (I believe it was 1,000) that he had to reach before he could stop writing. If he did not reach it in the time he had allotted for writing, then that coffee shop was "blacklisted," never again to be visited for writing. Perhaps it was just that, on those particular days, Donald Miller simply did not have it in him to write that much. Perhaps he did not get enough sleep the night before or had a fight with his girlfriend and that kept him from hitting 1,000 words. Or perhaps it is possible that the genius inhabiting the walls of that particular failed coffee shop was not a very good one. Or perhaps it was busy talking to another creative mind, longing to be expressed by an expectant pen, brush, or tongue. Now, Donald Miller can afford to do this because he lives in Portland - we only have one coffee shop in Boiling Springs. Luckily, the genius there has done well for me.

But I have felt this - this disembodied inspiration from somewhere else entirely, helping me to express that which I would never have imagined expressing. Where did that come from? I didn't know that I knew that. And it is moments like these and ideas like this one that make me realize that I need to write more, to make my pen or fingers or even voice available to allow the divine spark to find its expression, to harness that creative energy that is part me, part genius. It is in that physical manifestation of the indefinable where work and art begin to mingle.

Creating a Blog on the Way to Winthrop University

I am on a bus, creating a blog as we approach Rock Hill, South Carolina - we play Winthrop tonight in women's basketball. I only have a moment for this first post because I spent too much time tweaking the layout, but I do have a few thoughts. More than a few actually - they are legion and they are scattered. And this is a key motivator in creating this blog. That I have so many scattered thoughts, fragmented aspects of my personality and spirit, that I hope to make more sense of. I am a former collegiate swimmer, a college student, a coaching staff member of Gardner-Webb University's women's basketball team, an English major, a human being. I am being coached through intermittently industrial and suburban Rock Hill, I have a headache, SportsCenter is on the satellite televisions scattered about the bus, and the sun is setting over Winthrop's arena as we approach. I have been watching TED talks, learning new ideas, considering working on my thesis studying Cormac McCarthy, and thinking through game prep stuff. Time to exit the bus - life doesn't wait for me to sort these things out!