Posts, Goals, and Goalposts

The hard lesson I've learned from playing hockey and why it's valuable to me as a writer

I’m not sure how many of you notice when I’m a day or two late with my posts. But I do, and it frustrates the hell out of me.

Writing is very important to me. It’s the thing that makes me feel like the best version of myself, my most treasured mode of creative self-expression, the primary tangible gift I feel I have to offer, and the subject of many future ambitions.

When I do miss a post, I think two things:

1) Alright, let me wait til Thursday. Tuesday, Thursday—they kind of look the same on paper if you squint your eyes a bit, so maybe if I post something on Thursday, I can pretend it’s actually Tuesday? Maybe?

2) Why did I miss that week’s post?

Sometimes I’m late with a post simply because I had other stuff going on that week and just didn’t have time to finish by Monday evening. I give myself a pass on those and typically don’t worry too much about it.

It’s much harder to give myself a pass when I had all the time in the world, when I wanted to write, when I felt I had plenty of energy to write, and I just couldn’t come up with something I wanted to write about or couldn’t come up with anything I deemed to be “good enough” to post.

That’s what’s been happening lately. It feels shitty.

And yet, I never hit the panic button when this happens. Why?

Because I’m a hockey player.

Huh?

Whoobleck?

Last week, I wrote this post about the recurrence and correspondence between mental and material waves in my life. Some of you thought that was neat.

Thanks, me too.

What I’m attempting to do now is something similar. And it is my third attempt at writing a post for this week. Attempt 1 was a post about writing. Attempt 2 was a post about hockey.

Attempt 3 is about the thread that binds them together in the book of my life (am I a poet or what?).

In a sense, it’s still about waves, about ups and downs: I go through hot and cold stretches with both writing and hockey.

But the focus this time is on the resting position underlying the ups and downs of the waves: the imaginary line running right through the peaks and valleys.

There’s a very important life lesson I’ve learned from playing 9 years of semi-organized beer league ice hockey (and before that, about a decade of highly unorganized street hockey). It’s a lesson that I’ve since seen echoed across the world’s major religious traditions, which I studied and wrote about professionally for over a decade.

It’s not the kind of lesson that you learn once and have tucked away for life. It’s much too difficult a lesson to stay cemented that easily. It’s more like oobleck, or some other non-Newtonian fluid: you scoop it up and it feels solid in your hand…for about a second, and then it starts dripping through your fingers.

The lesson is this:

You can do all the right things and still see shit go sideways. For that reason, you can’t determine or assess your actions solely based on a particular goal: in the case of writing, a good (or any) finished piece, and in the case of hockey, a literal goal.

Lived Philosophy

People often remark how ironic, unexpected, or funny it is that I play hockey—partly because I grew up in Florida, but also because of how “chill” I am. For me, there is an amusing sense of irony in the irony they attempt to illustrate by invoking the term “chill.” What can be more chill than playing a sport that takes place on a giant sheet of ice?

I get what they mean, though. From the outside looking in, hockey seems like a barbaric gladiator sport to a lot of people, with all the hitting and fighting and bloody, toothless grins. For many people, hockey = violence.

How could this chill, peaceful, spiritual, philosophical guy be a fan of such a sport, much less spend so much time playing it?

But there’s something important about both spirituality and philosophy that has been largely swept under the rug through centuries of obsessing over formalized rules and strata of authority with the former and academicizing the fuck out of the latter:

They are meant to be lived.

In the absence of a living expression, a religion or a philosophy is nothing more than an empty husk, no matter how pretty and iridescent it may look on the outside.

Hockey is not a practice that contradicts my spiritual and philosophical ideas and values. It is a living expression of those things.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend like hockey isn’t a violent sport; there are two spots on my body that bear visible witness to the fact that it is.

But it’s also a sport that can teach you steadiness, contentment, and how to live in the present, if you’re willing to listen: all things that are important spiritual values to me, and all things that I’ve come to treasure as hallmarks of my successful management of mental illness and a healthy system of meaning-making.

But here’s the thing: hockey is violent. It’s not a gentle teacher. It teaches you these things by constantly making you feel like you’re fucking up…over and over and over again.

“The sky is not disturbed”

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most well-known and treasured spiritual texts that exists, and it was the favorite scripture of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most well-known paragons of nonviolence in human history.

And yet, The Bhagavad Gita is literally a dialogue between an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and a warrior named Arjuna, in which Vishnu persuades Arjuna to take up his arms and lead his army against an opposing army of friends and family in the midst of a bloody civil war.

He does, and (nearly) everyone fucking dies.

What’s up with this super chill guy being a fanboy of such a violent text?

Now, at this point I could go real deep down a rabbit hole of theological analysis and draw further comparisons between the spiritual messages of the text and my feelings about hockey, and I could drop some dope one-liners to reinforce the idea that peace is more commonly forged in the crucible of struggle and violence than it is born from a cradle of comfort (you like that one?).

I know I could do this because I did do this, a couple of days ago when I took my first crack at this post. It took me way far afield from what I originally intended to write about and made me curl up into a ball, rocking back and forth as I tried to convince myself that Thursday is just as much Tuesday as Tuesday is Tuesday.

So, to circumvent that, suffice it to say I brought up the Gita just so that I could share this quote from Gandhi, since it’s a nice, succinct expression of the lesson that this post is all about:

“This is the unmistakable teaching of the Gita. He who gives up action falls. He who gives up only the reward rises.”¹

—Gandhi
(yes, actually Gandhi, not some fake bullshit internet Gandhi quote)

And it’s not just the Gita that teaches this. There’s a version of it to be found in the teachings of Confucius.

“Since in being moral one can neither be assured of a reward nor guaranteed success, morality must be pursued for its own sake. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental message in Confucius’ teachings.”²

One of my favorite religious expressions of this principle, though, comes from the Zen monk and teacher Shunryu Suzuki:

“Nin [patience, constancy] is the way we cultivate our own spirit. Nin is our way of continuous practice. We should always live in the dark empty sky. The sky is always the sky. Even though clouds and lightning come, the sky is not disturbed. Even if the flashing of enlightenment comes, our practice forgets all about it. Then it is ready for another enlightenment.”³

Me, pastel and ink on paper

Every hockey player loves scoring goals. It feels great. Like, really great—one of the best feelings I’ve known in life. Scoring a goal in a hockey game gives me a little mood boost that can carry on for a few hours or even a few days. It’s a bright, sudden flash of exhilaration, like a flash of lightning. But why? Why does it feel so good?

A Comedy of Errors

Hockey is perhaps the fastest-moving sport there is, not just in miles per hour, but in terms of the speed of cognitive processing necessary to not only make a good play but also to avoid all the dangerous shit flying at you (or toward which you are flying).

For all but the very best players on the ice, there’s rarely enough time to look up and assess all your options at any given moment; there’s barely enough time to think at all. It’s a game that takes place in 90-second bursts of adrenaline-fueled raw reaction. It’s hard to feel like you did the “right” thing on a given play, since “you”—the you that sits up there somewhere behind your eyes, we’re told—aren’t even pulling the strings.

But even if you could slow things down, think through all your options, pick out the best one, and execute your actions perfectly, there’s still no guarantee you’ll score that goal or make that save or stop the opposing player. There’s just too much that can go wonky: the puck wobbles a bit just before it gets to your stick; it hits a bad patch of ice and skips over your teammate’s stick; it hits the outside of the goalpost instead of the inside of the goalpost; it goes half an inch wide of the 2-inch wide open corner of netting you’re aiming for.

The sky is cloudy more often than not.

But there’s a flip side to this: clouds are where the lightning comes from.

Last week, I set up a goal that went past the goalie after bouncing off someone’s helmet.

It sounds like a wildly improbable play, but more goals are scored like this than not. Maybe it’s not a puck off the helmet, but rather off someone’s skate or stick; maybe the goalie makes the initial save, but the puck then happens to bounce right toward the stick of another offensive player in front of the net. Sometimes these things go in your favor, sometimes they go against your favor. They’re not pretty—that’s why they’re called “garbage goals”—but they count just as well.

Clouds or lightning, it’s all the same: they come and go as they will. You can’t make them appear or go away, and you can’t live in either one forever. That’s the good news and the bad news—the most frustrating part about playing hockey and the most beautiful part, the part that makes it poetry in motion, an icy reflection of the human experience.

Writer’s…Cloud?

I don’t like the term “writer’s block.” Sure, sometimes my writing gets blocked, just like my shots on the ice sometimes get blocked. But most of the time, I’m getting the shots off—they’re just not going where I want them to.

It’s less like a block and more like a cloud: it obscures vision and aim, but it’s also a harbinger of lightning.

Currently, I’m going through a bit of a cold snap with both my goal-scoring and my writing. And that’s not a coincidence—that’s usually how it goes.

I can and have been sitting down to write—it just hasn’t been going where I want it to lately. But I don’t panic because I know I’m still doing all the right things, the things I can control.

I’m eating well, sleeping well; I’m getting up early and setting up the conditions of my morning writing ritual like I always do. When the writing doesn’t go well, I still do what I always do later in the day: I spend time by myself outside, I go hang out with friends, I play hockey.

Work? Oh yeah, work’s in there somewhere as well.

I don’t know where these clouds or lightning bolts come from. When the lightning is flashing freely, it’s tempting to boast and revel and pretend like I’m firing it straight from my fingertips like some kind of god. But if I do that for the lightning, I end up doing the same with the clouds: it’s my fault; I’m doing something wrong.

No bueno. Not with hockey, not with writing, not with life. There are too many stressful things in life for us to stress doubly over outcomes we can’t control, to judge ourselves by rewards rather than actions.

It’s not a good formula for steadiness, contentment, or living in the moment.

Hockey hurts sometimes. It’s frustrating, I would say, most of the time. Sometimes I score five goals in a game; sometimes I drop a goose egg. But I have to remind myself that, in both cases, I’m doing all the same shit.

Scoring goals feels great because of how much shit has to go right for it to happen: it’s a beautiful moment when the stars align and all the preceding unrewarded work finally pays off. But most of that shit is shit I didn’t and can’t control.

I feel good when I know I took care of all the things I can control, and I try not to worry too much about the results or lack thereof.

I try not to worry. It’s hard. It will always be hard. Like I said, it’s a lesson that has to be continually reinforced. I play hockey 2-3 times a week, most weeks, and it still doesn’t feel like enough to keep the semi-fluid lesson in its solid state.

But hockey is just a game. As hard as it is to live up to this principle on the ice, it’s much harder off the ice. It’s much harder to live in the dark, empty sky when it comes to writing (or any other parts of life, for that matter).

It’s hard to spend hours writing something, hit a wall, decide to scrap the whole thing, and feel like I accomplished anything. It’s especially hard when that happens, and I don’t have any better writing topic in mind for next time.

In part, I think it’s harder because I have teammates with me on the ice: I know they see what I am doing out there just as much as they see all the shots I goof up in one way or another.

There’s no one to see all the thinking and written work that amounts to nothing tangible, no one to pat me on the back when I head back to the bench after willingly getting leveled by a 215-pound defenseman for the sake of making a hustle play.

The toughest part, though, is that, after over a year of writing on here, I still don't feel like I have a much better sense of what kind of writing I want to be doing or what I want to be writing about in general. It’s like getting the puck at one end of the ice, only to look up and see there is no goal at the other end. I know I have all the skills; I know how to apply those skills; I know that every time I sit down to write, whether I’m successful or not, I’m sharpening those skills. But with nothing to aim at, I’m just skating around in circles. And as much as I do like skating around, I don’t want to be doing that forever.

I want to feel like I’m doing all the right things, but it just feels like I’m fucking up over and over and over again. Something is missing, without which it’s very hard to want to write. I’m not even sure if the dark expanse I’m staring at these days is the sky or the ground.

And yet, I’m still writing.

I’m publishing this post, even though it feels like two piles of garbage that I smushed together after letting them bake under the sun for a couple of days, hoping that, if the garbage goals count the same as all the others, then maybe the garbage posts do as well.

It wasn’t Gandhi or Confucius or Suzukui-sama who taught me this—they just gave me the words to understand it in a new way. I learned the living component, instead, from Gretzky and Jagr and Ovechkin, and years of my own experience on the asphalt and ice. And as long as I’ve got enough “nin” to keep lacing up my skates, it ought to be enough to keep banging away at the keyboard, too, even if I don’t yet know what it’s all for. Right?

P.S. sorry for all the “fuck”s and “shit”s this week—I guess I was just in one of those moods. Or maybe I’ll blame it on the complimentary bottle of wine I got from the hotel I’m staying at this week (didn’t bring my microphone with me to voice record this, so sorry for that as well).

Thank you for reading/listening! You are the chillest!
Please consider subscribing and/or sharing with a friend who’s as chill as you 😎

1. Mahatma Gandhi in The Norton Anthology of World Religions: Vol. 1, Ed. Jack Miles (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 645.

2. D.C. Lau in Confucius, The Analects, Translated by D.C. Lau. Penguin Classics (London, England: Penguin Books, 1971), pg. 13.

3. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), 74.