Page 68 of Hell Bent
Another fifty yards, and he said, “So you’re not even going to tell me? Adults are usually dying to tell you stuff.”
“But as you say, I’m not all that versed in the parental deal. You saying you want to hear?”
“I guess. Since we’re walking, and I don’t have my headphones in.”
Right. I seemed to be going out on another limb. “I meditate, for one. First thing in the morning. Takes less than ten minutes.”
“What does that mean? Do you say ‘Om’ or something?”
“I do something called a gratitude meditation. It’s a script. I practice focusing on my breath and feeling gratitude and kindness toward people.”
He stared at me. “You’re kidding. That’s so lame. Not badass at all.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, “but it works for me. It shifts my focus from my needs, my worries, my desires, to considering that the people around me have their own needs and desires, and it also puts me in a more receptive frame of mind to get feedback, which is how Idomanage to make a living kicking a ball. But mainly, it gives me a framework to practice letting a thought or a feeling pass through me without getting stuck there. It’s the difference between pain and suffering.”
At the gate now, with boarding happening in fifteen minutes, so I found a seat, and Ben sat down with me and asked, “What do you mean? They’re the same.”
“Vocabulary-wise, maybe, except for this. One meaning of suffering is ‘troubled by pain or loss.’ The suffering isn’t the pain. It’s beingtroubledby the pain.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“I didn’t get it for a while either. I guess the idea is, everybody has pain. Like your mom dying, and my dad dying. That’s serious pain, and grief is a whole process. Just likegetting cut from a team is a process. It’s always going to hurt, but how long it keeps hurting and how much you spiral down when it happens—that depends how much time you spend in the suffering. Radical impermanence requires radical acceptance, because everything changes. Always. It’s the one truth of life, that there’s no long-term security, no long-term comfort, and the more we chase it and try to wrap our arms around it and hold it down so it won’t get away, the more afraid we become. The trick is accepting that, being able to ride the waves of those changes.”
“That sounds like, ‘Think positive!’” Ben said. “Or, ‘Go through life with no attachments! Much easier that way!’ I hate it.”
“You can hate it,” I said. “Nobody’s making you do it. But I’m a professional athlete. Succeeding at that takes more than physical fitness. It takes mental fitness, emotional fitness. I can’t be thinking, every time I go to make a hard kick, ‘What if I miss this? Am I going to get cut?’ See, the thing about kickers is, you may not seem that important, but when you’re on the field, you’re about as important as it gets, and you’re all alone. Anybody can make the kicks in practice. Making them in the clutch situations, that’s the trick. To do that, I’ve got to be able to feel things and let them go. I have to be absolutely present in the moment and not in my head, and I can’t afford to let doubt and fear creep in.”
“Because if you go out to Baltimore on Saturday and choke,” Ben said, “that’s the end of your season.”
“Exactly. Whereas if we do our absolute best and we lose anyway—that’ll suck, but that’s sports, too. You have to hate to lose in order to win. I mean, you have tohateit. Enough to do anything to try to make it not happen. Ask Harlan Kristiansen how it feels to drop a pass in the postseason. How it feels to drop a Hail Mary in the postseason, especially. He’ll probably tell you the same thing. Got to have a whole lot ofconfidence in your ability to improve, and in your ability to perform next time, to deal with that. When you do screw up, or just try something that’s beyond you—jump for a ball you can see is overthrown, or attempt a sixty-five-yard field goal because that’s the only possibility left—you can’t let failure affect you beyond pushing to improve in every way you possibly can. You can’t afford to feel like a loser. You can’t let yourself suffer.”
“Great,” Ben said, as they called our flight. “I’ll just do that, then. Totally applies here. Good talk.”
“I said it’s what I try to do,” I said as we stood up. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
27
LOST
Sebastian
When we were on the ground in Vancouver and had scanned our passports through Canadian customs, I told Ben, “Let’s get lunch. It’s almost one.”
“But we only have a few hours,” he said.
“Next time, we can pack a lunch, but I need to eat.”
“Can’t we just do the drive-through?” he asked. “With the Uber? Can you eat in an Uber?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “and we’re not going to find out, because I have a meal plan. There’s a place here where I can get squash soup plus a poke bowl with pickled ahi tuna. I looked it up.”
“Oh, great,” he said. “Because I totally want a poke bowl, whatever that is, with raw tuna in it. And squash. Gross. And it’ll take forever. We have togetthere.”
“Good news. They have hamburgers, too. And I know you want to get there. Airport restaurants are fast, because they have to be.”
“Why can’t we just wait half an hour and eat at the house?” He seemed truly agitated now.
I stopped walking and turned to him. “I thought of that, but I don’t think it’ll work.”
