Skip to main content

Playing Frisbee in the Rain

Last night, I played ultimate frisbee in the rain.

1 hour and 45 minutes of rain.
Pouring rain.
Wind too.
Did I mention the rain?

I am a bit of a rain wimp, and as I stood shivering on the sidelines between shifts, I vacillated between two thoughts:

Thought #1: I am winning. I am amazing. I am in the rain and I am not dying.

Thought #2: Why am I doing this? Why am I shivering in this cold when I have a warm, dry home? What kind of macabre self-torture am I putting myself through?

At the one hour mark, I said to my teammates, "I don't know if I can finish this game." I said the same thing ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, and then maybe every 30 seconds until the buzzer went. We lost by a wide margin, but I got a ride home and was grateful for the warm shower waiting for me there.

---

You all know I'm prone to reflection, and I've been thinking a lot this past week about loved ones who've been sailing rough seas for quite some time. I imagine their thoughts sometimes go along similar lines - at times feeling that in enduring, they are winning; then wondering why they are pushing through instead of jumping ship, feeling certain they'll call it quits around the next corner.

I have great respect for the times we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, face adversity (rain) square in the eyes and say, "I will not be sidelined!" And I have great compassion for the sight of my friends shivering in the rain, clothes plastered to their skin as the opponents are racking up the points.

I cannot stop the metaphorical rain, and sometimes I don't even have an umbrella to offer. Sometimes the other team hits hard and your team fumbles, and even you make a mistake or two.

What I'm trying to say is this: life is not like a box of chocolates; it's like a game of ultimate frisbee in the rain. I'm not in charge of the weather, but if you're on my team, I'll show up and shiver and try to find an umbrella or a towel or a ride home at the end of the night.

Because that's what a team does.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thin
1 comment
Read more

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro
2 comments
Read more

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st
Post a Comment
Read more