A Basketball Game

A few days ago I watched my eleven-year-old grandson participate in the playoffs for his junior basketball league.  The game was a thriller, with the final score decided in the last minute, 48-46.  Our grandson played on the winning team, which will now advance to the quarter finals. 

My grandson raced up and down the court, blocked opposing players, passed the ball, and shot it into the basket as if absolutely nothing in the world was more important than what he was doing, as if his life depended on the outcome of the game.  He was not alone.  He and all his teammates played with ferocious intensity. 

As I watched them play, I wondered if anything in their life will ever seem as important to them.  Will they ever be so riveted to their task?  Will they ever be as totally present as they were in the game I watched?

It will probably be impossible for my grandson to maintain the same level of intensity all the time in the situations of everyday life.  Only if he is unfortunate enough to find himself under fire, at war, is he likely to keep that level of adrenalin flowing for so long.  Nonetheless, I hope that he will find an occupation that arouses his passion, so that he wakes up in the middle of the night to think about solutions to the problems it poses, so that he gets up in the morning eager to go to work.  Such a person is blessed.

As I wondered about his future, I thought about my past and about the projects that aroused a high level of commitment, projects that consumed me.  There have been, I’m glad to say, more than a few.  But the last such project ended about 12 years ago.  Since then I worked for several years on another undertaking, a history, but in the end it came to nothing, mainly because I was never in love with it to begin with.  I won’t say that the fires that once burned within me have died out.  It would be more accurate to say that they’re smoldering, banked under a layer of ash.  But I haven’t found a poker to stir them up again.

At 80, it seems to me that I’m entitled to stop searching for that poker and simply to be grateful for those projects that were for me the equivalent of my grandson’s basketball game.  Many people, after all, spend their whole working lives without ever finding their occupation engrossing or, as I found it many times, thrilling.  Tennyson’s adage about having loved and lost applies to work as well as to love.  Nonetheless, I keep looking for that topic that might stir those fires once again. In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on my grandson – indeed on all my grandchildren – in the hope that each of them finds work that arouses their passion.


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