Having already established in an earlier post Seneca allows us to guiltlessly pull quotes from wherever we find truth, we may as well go contemporary and take what we can from the above. Andrew Bernard, played by Ed Helms on “The Office,” full of melancholy, realizes the glory days of his former employment at Dunder Mifflin are gone and he misses them. He realized, only too late, he failed to appreciate his time there while it was happening. His fond recollection of his co-workers and the good times he shared with them was relegated to reminiscence, rather than being something he savored contemporaneously while employed there.
“It’s fiction!” you might say. “It’s just a television show!” you might continue. Well, television is a medium for telling stories and even fictional stories can convey a lot of truth. So, let’s examine this.
I’m brought to this subject by a recent change in my circumstances. After three seasons of serving as a youth baseball coach, my time in coaching has ended. I loved coaching my son’s baseball team. It was a totally unanticipated blessing. A job I never knew I wanted and was probably never fully cut out for. But, I faked it until I made it and we had a ton of fun in the process. We were recently eliminated from the city championship and our season is over. The team is breaking up. It’s over.
I knew for the last month it wasn’t going to be possible to keep it together, so I did what I could to enjoy the remaining games and practices. I took some time to feel the heat of the sun on me as I played catch with the kids. I felt the dirt on my hands and legs from moving around the infield. I felt the soft turf of the outfield chasing balls the kids hit. I immersed myself in the game.
I played as a kid. Not well, but I played. Around the same age my son is now, I walked off the baseball diamond for the last time and didn’t think much about it for the next thirty years. Returning to the baseball fields after all this time I think I appreciated how quickly it all passes. I’d forgotten the exhilaration of standing in the infield and running scenarios about where to make the play if the ball came to me. So much pressure. My parents watching in the stands. An icy Gatorade waiting for me win or lose. I’ve been thinking about all those things. The end of this team was a second death of my involvement in baseball, likely a permanent one. It was nice to re-visit it and now it’s over all over again.
I told the team before the final games there was no viable way to keep everyone together. I thought they deserved the chance to play together knowing time was limited. We tend to appreciate things more knowing that they’ll end, even if we can’t conceive of how it will feel when it does. Just prior to telling the team, I ran across a meme that said something like, “at one point in your childhood, you went outside and played with your friends for the last time, and no one knew it.” That hit me hard. By nature, we don’t want to think about how anything we are doing could be for the last time. It’s too heavy, too morbid, too sad.
While I wouldn’t advise pessimism or a permanent state of Debbie-Downerism, I do think it’s important to keep a sliver of our consciousness aware that we aren’t promised to repeat these pleasurable things, or that they will last. They are transient. They are fragile. Recognizing this doesn’t have to make us sad, it can make us not take them for granted. Smell the grass. Look at the fresh chalk lines delineating fair from foul. Love the game. Love the moment. Be in it.
We lost our final game. So what? The kids will likely not remember our total wins versus losses. They’ll remember how it felt to play. They’ll remember what it felt to have a big moment when their parents were watching. I got to be a part of that. I got to help them learn how to wear victory with humility and defeat with grace. I’ll miss it, but I feel like I knew all the while it was special. It was limited. It was temporary. And because I knew that, I have no regrets that it’s over.
Commentaires