The following is a chapel talk I gave at the end of my St. Albans School tenure. I continue to explore the themes from it (an in progress novel, which I leak bits of into this blog) addresses some of theses ideas). It's a long one, bear with me.
Chapel: 5/19/2008
My story this morning will end with a memory of throwing a lacrosse ball against a brick wall. Over and over, just like a million times before. And while I will talk about lacrosse, let your mind visit your own story. Shooting endless free throws in an empty gym, taking ski run after ski run, playing guitar for hours, rehearsing a scene—whatever your own interests are.
* * *
In a regular season game, the varsity lacrosse team scored 3 goals in the last three and a half minutes of the 4th quarter to go to overtime with Landon. Where, ultimately, we lost.
After the game, after I’d changed out of coaching clothes, grabbed my school bag, and was walking home, I went to field again as some of our players still lingered out there. Sticks in hand, and bag of balls dumped out in front of the goal. Shooting, passing, or just standing there.
Two of them were juniors, juniors whom I’d taught in C Form my first year, their first year, at St. Albans. I tried to think of magic words… words that could have helped me back when I was in their situation.
I told them they’d played well, played hard. But I don’t know to what extent they heard that or were ready to hear it.
In their eyes I saw just raw emotion. And in the midst of the pain of this loss, they held onto their lacrosse sticks, unwilling, unable to vacate the field. I didn’t know how long they’d stay into the evening and shoot. As I stood there, I envied not their pain, but the utter passion and dedication that makes such pain possible. And I was happy for them for caring that much.
Elie Wiesel wrote that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death but the indifference between life and death.
In athletics, too, the ‘thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’, are infinitely close. One hundredth of a second, a shot that ricochets off the pipe, a ball that teeters then drops off the wrong side of the rim, a line drive caught or uncaught.
So close, yet able to produce such disparate emotions.
There are no guarantees that if you work your hardest, train, practice, lift with all your might, you will win.
You can care deeply, work toward brilliance relentlessly, play with the utmost conviction that you will win, and still lose a game. And while that cuts deep, can feel like betrayal, can seem to tear your heart out… You will survive it. Your teammates will survive it, and you will grow stronger, as individuals and as brothers.
I also want to talk about something else, moments not recorded in the stat book, not part of the box score.
If you care enough…you’ll have these amazing moments along the way.
If you care enough, give enough, you get what Wordsworth wrote of as “spots of time”. Along the way you’ll be given vivid memories, key moments in your life where time seems compressed, your senses heightened, you feel you’re inside something important.
In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes: “Poets talk about ‘spots of time’, but it is really the fisherman who experiences eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish…”
Combine skill and passion, and those moments find you. Whether carving a steep path on skies, zipping through the woods on a mountain bike or in your trail shoes, on a field of play, with an instrument in your hands, or a paint brush, they’re possible. You can’t guarantee them, you don’t know when they’ll come, how long they’ll last, but it certainly seems, the more skilled and passionate you are, the more likely they’ll arrive.
Wordsworth didn’t consider these moments mystical, and neither do I. As we move at high speeds, seemingly acting on reflexes and instinct, our brains are engaged in an advanced analysis of current situations and past experiences, and maybe at certain moments, it all comes together. In these serious moments your eyes will be “wholly open”.
I have spots of time of my own that I can look back on and years, years later even seem to place my self back into. I can picture a particular goal against Navy, back on a rainy night in 1995. But I can also picture a shot in high school I cut across the crease, in one motion caught the ball and cranked it—perfect off hip placement, snug inside the pipe. But before the shot got to the net, the goalie’s stick came out of nowhere to snag it. Maybe he was experiencing his own spot of time. Or maybe not. Of the hundreds of shots I’ve taken only a handful have had that feeling attached to them, and as far I as can tell, watching them on tape, they appear no different than any of the others.
When I gave Norman Maclean’s quote a few moments ago, I didn’t complete the sentence. It goes like this:
“No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone…”
When you push yourself, you may lose.
There’s a motion detector security light outside my old high school gym. If it senses movement it turns on, maybe for 30 seconds or so, then goes off, resets, and another movement will turn it on again.
The night we lost in the state quarterfinals, I stood there alone in the alternating dark and light, throwing a lacrosse ball against the wall, Bang thump, Bang thump, bangthump like countless times before. I’d throw harder and harder and as I let go, or as ball and wall met, or on its return the light would click off, and in the dark I’d try to catch it. But I had no Jedi powers so I usually heard the ball scuttle away in the grass field behind me, sometimes it would smack my stick, arm or even my shin. And I’d track it down and throw again. But rarely I’d catch it, and if I did, I’d throw right back at the wall. Sometimes the light would have reset already and the movement would turn it back on. Sometimes it would not have, and a ball thrown in the dark was never caught in the dark.
I love that memory. I can see myself out there, car radio on, stick in hand any time I’m back in Ithaca and drive by my old high school at night. And while I would have preferred to win the game that night, the next best thing was to lose it.
As you go forward embrace your interests: athletic, artistic, and academic. Throw out fear and take on challenges. This is a special place, and I’m sure I won’t know just how much I’ll miss it until I’m gone.
jimfenzel.com
jimfenzel.com
