An Open Letter to Brandon Jenkins

     Today I wrote a letter to a Florida State football player named Brandon Jenkins, who was diagnosed with a season-ending left foot injury after the first game of this, his senior season. I mailed it to him this afternoon.

Dear Brandon,

My name is Logan Simpson. I will try to keep this letter brief, but ever since I heard that your injury was season-ending I have had an inexplicable urge to write to you. You and I are not so different. I have been where you are.

I am twenty-two years old, graduated last May from a small, Division I school in North Carolina called Gardner-Webb. For much of my life, my biggest goal was to swim in college, preferably at the Division I level. I signed a scholarship offer from Gardner-Webb and, having arrived at my goal, prepared to set to work on building a great athletic career, envisioning conference championships and maybe an eventual Olympic Trials qualification. After four weeks of team practice, I went to the doctor, complaining of pain in both my shoulders. Before I even swam one meet with my new team, I was told that I had torn the labrum in each of my shoulders and needed double shoulder surgery. My season was over and was instead spent working through a painful recovery process. It was the hardest year of my life, but I returned my sophomore year, ready to begin my four years in earnest after redshirting the previous one.

This time I made it to the first meet, then swam another, slowly inching my way back to the level I was before my injury. That November, we swam at a midseason invitational at Georgia Tech, competing against some the nation's elite teams (there was a team from Gainesville competing there, but I prefer not to mention obscenities here - besides I'm not even sure their university is actually accredited). I was finally reaching some of my old times in the pool, finally improving again. Then, in the middle of the 100-yard butterfly, I felt my left shoulder tear again. I finished the race, took off my goggles, threw them down at the pool deck as hard as I could, and went straight to a secluded corner of the venue where I could be alone to process what had just happened. And there in that corner, just between you and me Brandon, I cried. I was devastated. I knew after all the work I had put in from the age of seven, my career was about to end like this, on the brink of becoming good, an unremarkable career set against the backdrop of some of the nation's best teams competing at the pool that hosted the Atlanta Olympics. And I was right - it was the last race I would swim.

I tell you this story in the hopes that, in it, you might find solidarity, that someone else has felt some of the things you are feeling and can say, "me too." Last Saturday, I was watching the FSU/Wake Forest game on television, thoroughly enjoying the thrashing Wake was receiving, when the camera focused on you, watching the action from the sideline, the commentator saying something about your being an All-American candidate and how crushing a blow your loss was to the Seminoles' defense. He quickly moved on, discussing Bjoern and Tank and Mario, and how they would be asked to pick up the slack. To be sure, replacing you is a tall order - I greatly admire the way you play the game. I was taken aback at how quickly the commentator moved on to talking about the other defensive linemen. It seemed like there should have been a highlight reel showing some of your accomplishments, your greatest plays, the hard work you have put into rebuilding what has become once again one of the nation's elite defenses.

Partly, I think I wanted to tell you that you have not been forgotten. Though the team must move on and put new players on the field in your stead, you have not been replaced. We still remember the great things you have done over your first three years at Florida State and thank you for your hard work. When FSU takes the field against Clemson Saturday night, though everything inside of you surely longs to be on the field taking shots at Tajh Boyd and Andre Ellington, just know that there will be fans thinking of you, remembering what you've done for the program, and wishing you well in your recovery from injury.

As I mentioned earlier, the year I sat out was the hardest of my life. I withdrew from my teammates, jealous of their ability to swim healthily. I wanted people to feel as sorry for me as I did. I stopped taking care of myself. There is so much potential for a misfortune like this shape you for the worse if you let it. Because hardship such as this will shape you. I did not realize this and allowed my misfortune to shape me negatively for too long. All along, I asked "why?" but that was the wrong question. I still don't know why it happened. The correct question to ask was and is "what now?" How will I respond? How can I redeem this terrible situation?

I urge you to find strength from those around you, from this letter, to rally around your teammates, finding ways to impact your team. I did not realize what kinds of contributions I could have made outside of the pool, even as a lowly freshman. I want to encourage you to have faith that this injury, senseless though it seems, can be given purpose, can make sense if you cause it to. You can give it meaning and I encourage you to do so. As incredible a player and leader as you have been on the field, I have no doubt that you can thrive in this challenging situation. I have heard the voices of disappointment and hope that you can silence them and press on. I have felt the pain of injury rehabilitation and hope you will find strength to push through, to heal in preparation for what I firmly believe will be an exceptional and wildly successful football career for years to come.

For too long, I felt that I had let people down by getting hurt. My dad was the coach of my college swim team and, above all, I felt that I had disappointed him. I carried that with me for a long time before I realized that feeling was not coming from my father - it was coming from me. You have let nobody down. Your value is not determined by your ability to play football, but by your intrinsic value as a human being.

Thank you again for your hard work as a Florida State football player. I wish you well in your recovery from this injury. 

All the best,

Logan Tyler Simpson

Ultimate Songs

There are few things I love more in the world of music than the last song on an album, that perfectly articulated finishing touch on the body of work preceding it. Far more important than how a work begins is how it ends, the resonance it leaves with its audience. The Reckoning, NEEDTOBREATHE's latest album, flows together beautifully as a coherent narrative, a cohesive collection of lyrics and music. I discovered this while running the perimeter of campus yesterday. If you have a chance, listen to the whole album, straight through, processed with such a filter. Without further ado, here is the album's ultimate song:


Learn to Love - NEEDTOBREATHE

I need the fear of a love that's lost
I need to stop trying to count the cost
I need a fight on the losing side
And always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know the pain of a broken heart
We can't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
Learn to love through the darkness and the light
I'm on your side
I'm on your side

I had the fortune of a second chance
I know the reason why we all should dance
I've seen the end and all you have to do
is always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know the pain of a broken heart
We won't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
We can learn to love through the darkness and the light
We can learn to love through the darkness and the light
I'm on your side
I'm on your side
Oh, I'm on your side
Hey, I'm on your side

Always hold true
I will always stay with you
Yeah, you always hold true
I will always stay with you

Till we know a broken heart
We can't walk through the fires we didn't start
So just hold on to the way it is tonight
And learn to love through the darkness and the light
Learn to love
We learn to love
Learn to love
We learn to love

(You can listen to it here if you like: http://needtobreathe.net/discography/)

A Season of Summer

I was formerly under the misconception that the notion of summer fostered throughout childhood slowly dissipates until it is abruptly halted upon reaching adulthood. A real, full-time job always loomed on the horizon, daunting, threatening to render the summer months no different from those dreary winter ones on the opposite side of the calendar. This summer I learned this does not have to be the case. At least not right now.

I returned to Boiling Springs late Saturday night after two months away, working at Camp Weequahic in the mountains of Pennsylvania for seven weeks and then visiting my good buddy (and fellow brogger) Matt Leonard in Nassau, Bahamas for a week and a half. It was like stepping back into the many summers of my youth, this time with a bit of responsibility and influence, but the essence remained somehow the same. Those two months encompassed so much more than I could possibly talk about adequately in the space and time provided, so I will boil it down simply and hopefully unpack some of the stories later.

This summer, I mentored a bunk of awesome campers, coached in one of America's most intense and impassioned basketball leagues (seriously, try telling those kids the Weequahic Basketball League isn't the NBA - I dare you), broke my left middle finger climbing a rope (from floor to ceiling starting seated, succeeding just before the aforementioned fracture), helped write and lead half the camp in performing a rap parody of Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" for a song competition ("one of the coolest things I've ever seen" said our camp director, just sayin'), watched Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises all in a span of twenty-four hours, ran into Justin Beiber in New York City, nailed a roundoff into a backflip, watched David Letterman live (Alec Baldwin was the guest and both he and Letterman dropped their pants during the show - classic stuff), swam in Lake Wallenpaupack (and learned how to spell "Wallenpaupack"), saw Scranton (The Electric City!), read great books like Pride and Prejudice, Eli the Good, Shoeless Joe, Oh! the Clear Moment, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and Letters to a Young Poet, played guitar on my bunk's front porch, wrote a good bit, took three practice GREs (funny little thing: I consistently scored higher on math than verbal - and by funny I mean really annoying), went to Hershey Park for free, made some amazing friends, rocked "Call Me Maybe" on the guitar for the whole camp (a girl named Shanice sang and she was unbelievable), helped a camper shave for the first time, taught guitar classes, played pretend baseball at sunset on Pennsylvania's own Field of Dreams, had a deep conversation with a complete stranger in the Newark Airport, slept in the Miami International Airport during a thirteen-hour overnight layover, was lectured by a baggage agent in Nassau after her airline lost my luggage (it was apparently my fault because I let my bag out of my sight - yes mom, I was nice to her), swam with sting rays and jellyfish and eels in Nassau coral reefs, held my breath underwater for three minutes and five seconds, journeyed to Atlantis, walked on a rope bridge over a hammerhead shark, bought a signed copy of I Can't Sleep by one of the coolest women I have ever meet, ate lunch and dinner at the Nassau Yacht Club, coached a group of Bahamian kiddos at Swift Swimming, taught a high school girl how to swim all four strokes so she could take a swimming fitness class in school, grew an increasingly less pathetic (if not all the while devilishly handsome) goatee, wrote a song with Matt, played my favorite song after sunset on the beach with waves crashing in the background, ate ridiculous amounts of conch and caneps, listened to a brilliant speech by a banking expert about how to fix the banking crisis (you should check out John Tomlinson's book Honest Money - very simple solutions which are slated to be proposed, in a bill he helped draft, to Parliament this fall), ate dinner with some incredible young and young-at-heart families who make starting a family at some point seem less scary, recorded songs with Matt in the upstairs of his massive apartment, gathered driftwood for a beach campfire (where we played great music, watched an offshore thunderstorm, and witnessed the glory of bioluminescence), played frisbee on Montagu Beach in a raging thunderstorm, and flew back into Charlotte amid the glowing rays of a stunning sunset. 

Just before I left for Pennsylvania, I learned to play a song called "Keep Your Eyes Open" by a band called NEEDTOBREATHE (fun fact: I can also play the Taylor Swift one). I played it regularly on the front porch of Bunk 1 at camp, my kids patiently listening as I tried my best to hit the notes. Two nights before leaving the Bahamas, Matt and I played it with waves crashing at our feet. The lyrics encompass our lives at the present, as we look toward the future and make the moves necessary to align ourselves with our larger life goals, realizing that the decisions we make in these next years, months, even weeks, will irreversibly dictate the trajectory of our lives. One of the choruses says:

"If you never leave home, never let go, you'll never make it to the great unknown till you keep your eyes open my love. Show me your fire. Show me your heart. You know I'll never let you fall apart if you keep your eyes open my love."

For we who are living in some kind of in-between, unsure of what, exactly sandwiches us with the past, it is a mantra of sorts, a call to living. Setting down roots deep enough to hold to and yet shallow enough to be uprooted at the first call of adventure or opportunity. It is a difficult art, but a beautiful life.

Back in the Springs

After a lengthy absence, I have returned to the thriving metropolis and bustling hub of progressive culture that is Boiling Springs, North Carolina. It may be none of those things, but it is a good place to live for a little while, to call home from afar.

And after a lengthy hiatus, I am back to writing on this blog, after much serious thought given to the idea of scrapping it in favor of just writing occasionally on the Brog over at brosblogging.wordpress.com. I will try to devote adequate time and energy to make them both worth undertaking.

That being said, the last time I posted, I mentioned that I wanted to improve as a writer of poetry because I was, quite frankly, not very good. While that remains the case, I have worked a bit on my skills as they were, and have produced this piece, which I started writing on the porch of bunk one at Camp Weequahic in Pennsylvania:

The Mansion in the Yard
Amid the grove of pines in our front yard
stands a towering flowering magnolia,
capped by white blossoms -
the fingertips of gnarled limbs.

My father transplanted it there
at the center of the yard,
full-grown.
He dug the hole himself after watching me try
one too many times
to reach even the lowest limbs
of those great pines,
scraping my arms, legs, and belly
as I bear-hugged their trunks
and shimmied up.

On those occasions we have company,
they always complement the neat rows
of the great grove,
and then inquire about the magnolia,
why is it there where it doesn't quite fit and
couldn't it have gone outside the grove
instead of at its center?

Here my father shrugs
and winks at me.
Because he knows
I gave up shimmying
the day he planted that magnolia,
that it's the only tree I climb,
for its condescending limbs,
bent like soft bark elbows
as she stoops to hoist me
into her great canopy.

On her broad shoulders,
I can breathe
the air of the leaves.
Pressed against her breast,
I can be,
can safely watch the red roof of my house,
an annex to the mansion in the yard.

Love Rolls

*Note* - this - whatever it is - was inspired by the third chapter of Bob Goof's Love Does, titled "Ryan In Love" which tells a beautiful and moving story about a young man's proposal to his girlfriend. I set out to write a poem based on the chapter (I am making a concerted effort to get better at writing poetry because right now I am not good at it, but I would like to be) but ended up writing this, this...whatever it is.

You can see it in the eyes of a young couple walking hand in hand along the tideline at twilight, the sun descending toward the water. It is a scene that has played out a thousand times before and will a thousand hence. But no one told these two, the orange breeze kissing their cheeks and sandy hair.

You can see it in her surprise and his knowing smile as they stop at a table set for a banquet there on the beach. He pulls out her chair and slides it gently in as she sits for her feast, served by tens of friends in bow ties materializing from the wind. After dessert, dancing in the sand. After dancing, a short walk to the dock. She peers at the yacht awaiting them.

You can see it in her laugh as she boards, her resignation to an evening of surprises, of whimsy. Floating into the bay, piloted by an invisible captain. They look at the stars - more than usual have gathered for the occasion.

You can see it in his stare. He drops to his knee, presents a ring glimmering with starlight and asks: "will...you...marry...me?" Snatching the ring, she shouts yes and you can see it in her embrace, in their kiss. You can see it in the water cannons spouting from the yacht of a stranger, rented for free, for the asking of a man in love, impregnated by the belief that life could be magical.

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.