All In the Now

A METAPHOR:

I love an empty movie theater. When the darkness extends its invitation:

Please dreamer, join me and my friends, Loud Noise and Vibrant Image; take a seat, kick your feet up, enjoy the contraband bulge of candy in your purse, I won’t tell security, it will be our secret. Lose yourself in the blanket of someone else’s imagination come to life. For a few hours, I invite you, join me. . .  

 Craving the solitude of the theater, I indulge the darkness and accept his invitation.  Oh, what a host, he offers his previews, teasing me with the small snippets of film:

Jump aboard dreamer, for an adventurous ride through the past, present, and future. Listen to my story; I will entrance you and just when you beg for more, I will leave you; and it is on you to hitch the next train…

Like the gullible dreamer I am I jump aboard the tease train and ride the rail, preview after preview, for what I hope will be a long journey; and just as I settle in my seat and prop up my feet, the train halts, “Final stop,” he yells. “Get the Hell off.”

Eventually, he offloads me enough, and the once avid dreamer in me becomes skeptical. Ever so cautiously I jump on the next train, and endure the adventure, waiting to be heaved off. 

Oh the supreme discomfort of always anticipating the end of a thing –  half in and half out is no way to enjoy the thrilling ride of the theater. 

A LESSON: 

It is a dangerous existence. Half in and half out is no way to enjoy anything: life, sport, the movies. Each of which are similarly defined by their mortality. A season, a career, a story; inevitably, they all end.

One day, Spielberg will direct his last film, Phil Jackson will coach his last team, maybe he already has, and Charlaine Harris will write her last True Blood. And one day, yes one day, I will play my last hockey game.

A friend recently asked if I planned to play through 2016 and the Games in Rio. Come again. I don't understand Farsi. It was such an unfathomable, yet common, question. It made me shiver the idea of riding on that highly unproductive, distracting train of thought to the uncontrollable future.

Scary thing is, it is a train of thought that often passes by triggered by the oh so common question: What do you do?

I spent the past fall at Princeton University as an assistant Field Hockey coach. One of the best perks, or reliefs, about the job was answering that question.

What do you do? Well, I coach hockey at a University. Bam. Instant understanding, just like oatmeal. No perplexed eyes, demeaning questions / insinuations, or quick judgments.

Best of all, no need to pull the “Olympic” crutch card just to get people off your back and to half-understand and respect the fact that at the age of 25, yes, you are still playing a relatively unknown American sport on a national team that has yet to achieve true international success.

And, by the way, you make just enough to get by.

But, then you think, that is what makes this, "I play field hockey for a living" gig so incredible. The people who understand, well they aren't overly invested in the what and how questions. They already know the bigger answer, the inexplicable why answer. They understand that in your athletic existence, money and fame are meaningless. Something bigger, more pure, and more Olympic than glitz and glam drives you.

You have undertook this adventure driven by the human sport force. The one that inspires the dreams of children and the training of athletes. The one that drives each of us to be at our very best because at some unknown moment in time, on some unknown field of life, each of us will be called upon to serve our role in humanity. To do good for our team, our sport, our country, and our world. We will be called upon to uphold and enhance the legacies that we have inherited.  And until we do that our mission is not complete.

But trust me, one day, it will be complete, and this leg of the journey, like those before it and very much like those previews, will end. No matter how "in" we were.


A new train will roll into the station, and you be asked to jump aboard. Will you get all in? All In in the Now.