Over the weekend, a friend pointed out that it was our ten-year college graduation anniversary. Wow! As they say, time flies in quarantine.
In this reflective moment, I wondered briefly about what I learned in school that was helping me the most during this pandemic. There were a few candidates, but the winner became obvious very quickly - playing, or in my case not playing, on the college basketball team. When I get asked what position I played, I sometimes offer 'bench', and other times I lie. In terms of competitive action, I played six total minutes in four years. For those who like apples to apples comparisons, I did a rough back of the envelope calculation to translate years into minutes - four years, twenty-five games a year, forty minutes per game equals four thousand minutes. I played six minutes out of four thousand, and three of them on Senior Day. Still, even without the math, it's clear what happened during my college basketball career - almost nothing, just like now.
There were three really important beliefs that got me through the four years. These are basic ideas, almost simplistic, but for some reason regularly forgotten. Most people I know think they do all of these things all of the time, but for the most part they are just like me - coming up short in at least one of the three beliefs. During this lockdown, my sense is we are all falling short in these three areas, and perhaps by stating them now it will help someone over these next few weeks.
First, optimism about your future - you need to believe that things will get better for you and you need to constantly reinforce this belief for yourself. I'm not talking about the rational, big picture future, where we know human progress and innovation and technology will eventually make us all slightly better off. I'm talking about the irrational belief in your future, about which no one is allowed to change your mind. This belief is all about you and your future. Sometimes people will go out of their way to tell you that you don't have a future, as my coach did after our tryout period in my junior year - you can stay on the team until you graduate, but you probably won't play. I remained polite, but my internal response was a close variant of "fuck off", reminding myself that the truth was entirely wrong, so that my optimism remained intact.
Second, agency paves the road - you need to believe that wherever you are going, you won't get there unless you build your own path through deliberate, focused, and relentless effort. I recommend following your own instincts in terms of building your strengths, as I did in my senior year. Our offseason strength program would make me stronger and larger, but I knew that if I wasn't in the best shape on the team I would have no chance to get into a game, so I tailored the workouts to add power without sacrificing my conditioning. However, when it comes to weaknesses, I recommend following expert advice, as my coach provided after my sophomore season. Here was his assessment of my return after almost six weeks recovering from an ankle injury on our last day of preseason - porking became a negative factor. I remained polite, but I rationalized until my internal response involved some variant of "fuck off" and I left campus in spring ready to quit. I eventually acknowledged that I could make the truth wrong, so I packed my running shoes for my flight to Japan, ran a few kilometres every day, and came back to campus that fall twenty pounds lighter.
Finally, accept your role - you need to recognize that although everyone else is in the same boat as you, not everyone steers the ship. In fact, not everyone even gets to go out on the deck. When you are on the bench, you mentor the freshmen, offer observations to the seniors, and challenge every teammate to compete at the highest level in practice. This is what you do every single day. Your role can change, whether you want it to or not, but what never changes is that you accept your role and give it your full effort every single day. When my coach emailed me a few games into my senior year and wrote something along the lines of - keep up the practice effort, and your role might change - I remained polite, but I invented an internal response that involved some variant of "fuck off" just so I could keep focused on my current role. It took four more weeks of the same effort before I could acknowledge that there was nothing wrong with the truth, as my role did change, for three entirely forgettable minutes against Husson.
These are the things I learned at school that are the most relevant in this current moment. Every day, I recognize a difficult aspect of the present, but remember that one day I'll look back on today as another overcome obstacle, no matter how irrational it seems right now - optimism about your future. Every day, I think about my life journey, and decide what I can work on now to create my path. I try to be honest with myself about my strengths, accept help to identify my weaknesses, and resolve to rewrite my story through deliberate, focused, and relentless effort - agency paves the road. Every day, I aim to contribute to the larger cause, leveraging my understanding of a TEAM to give a full effort all the time, and keep myself focused on my current role regardless of how things might change in the near future - accept your role.
We are entering an important period in this pandemic - the swerve lane, between full-scale lockdown and some tentatively imagined vision for a new normal. It remains very much a team effort. For many, contributing from the bench is a new challenge, and although it's not as novel as it was three months ago it remains a difficult truth of the current moment. It's a major mental challenge for most of us to do the best thing we can do for the team if that means sitting on the bench and keeping certain disagreements to ourselves. The bench is never an easy place and sometimes you end up there for much longer than you ever planned. But there is nothing wrong with it, the truth is that most of what's wrong with the bench is entirely up to us, it is up to our mentality, and our beliefs. The game always ends, another one always begins, and it might be time for you to come off the bench. With optimism, agency, and acceptance, you can contribute from the bench while doing all you can to be ready to play.
