MadMup.com

My friend Dave was a running back for the football team in high school.  I don’t know his stats, but I remember he was pretty good.  I also remember that one time when were watching a game film, a coach told Dave that he needed to “belly more” on the end run.  I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but it had something to do with how he needed to get out and around the end before heading downfield.  Whatever it meant, it earned Dave the nickname of “Bellymore” for a while.  It sounds kind of like a British butler’s name, really.

That lasted until a particular game that didn’t go so well for Dave.  In this game, he ended up losing three fumbles.  “Bellymore” promptly became “Fumblemore,” which doesn’t have near as nice a ring to it.  Because of that game, Dave was assigned the task of carrying a football around with him for a week.  All day long at school there was Dave, carrying a football.  It was supposed to make him more comfortable with the ball so he’d carry it more naturally.  The rest of the team got an assignment, too.  Any time we saw Dave, we were supposed to try to knock the ball out of his grasp.

I don’t know if any of that helped Dave at all, but I don’t remember him having to do that again.  Aside from the discussion we could have about extracurricular activities intruding on Dave’s academic life, it got me thinking about what we hold on to and how we learn to do it.

Grudges seem to be a thing people hold on to for a long time.  I’ve known people who have carried grudges for years, refusing to let go even if they haven’t seen the offending party in almost as many years.  Usually someone holding on to a grudge is also holding on to bitterness as well.

Other people hold on to a good memory, something that stood out for them from whatever else was going on around them.  We see this in movies all the time – someone is told to find their “happy place” and we get a flashback to when they got a puppy as a kid or had a vacation on a tropical island.  It’s as if that puppy was the pinnacle of their life, and nothing else will ever match up to it.

In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Sybok offers to “take away” Captain Kirk’s pain. Captain Kirk gets downright belligerent and tells him, “No way! We need our pain, it makes us who we are, yada yada yada.”  (That’s a paraphrase.) He makes a good point, but there are still many who would love to give up the pain of having to watch Star Trek V, I’ll warrant.

Others hold on to heartbreak, in some cases because the lost love was their whole life, in other cases because the heartbreak is all they have left to show, and in still other cases because it’s easier to hide in the heartbreak then to try again.

How did any of these people learn to hold on to any of these things?  Pretty much the same way Dave learned to hold on to the football: they carry it with them daily.  Pretty soon it doesn’t matter who comes along and tries to knock it away from them, they’ve gotten very comfortable with it and won’t be fumbling  it away any time soon.

What do you hold on to particularly well?  Anyone who knows me can pick mine out of this list pretty easily.

If you’ve taken any American Lit classes at all, there’s about a 98.2% chance that you’ve read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It’s a great little twisted story and it’s full of all kinds of things that literature teachers love… I just can’t remember any of those things any more. I’m left with remembering that I liked the story and that’s okay for me. I write videogame reviews, but I honestly was never any good at picking apart literature and seeing all the stuff I was supposed to.

Anyway, I’m going to assume that you’ve read the story (and if you haven’t, follow that link up there and go read it real quick and come back – I’ll wait here), so you know the ending to it. The town has made their choice and Mrs. Hutchinson is it. Scapegoat time, dearie. Here’s the last line in the story:

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Everybody in town had the same exact chance of being chosen as she did, but of course that meant nothing to her once she was. That, I think, is usually how it is. The phrase “it isn’t fair” is generally only uttered by a person who thinks they’re getting the raw end of a deal. You never hear someone who just got free ice cream say “It isn’t fair that no one else got this!” Sean Penn didn’t say, “It isn’t fair that Mickey Rourke didn’t get this” when he won his Oscar this year. We only tend to bust out the “it isn’t fair” when we don’t like what’s happening.

It’s been a few years, enough so I don’t remember exactly how many, but I made a concerted effort to excise the phrase “it isn’t fair” out of my vocabulary. Of course, I’m not perfect, so it still works its way in from time to time, but its frequency has been less and less. Videogames that cheat are most often the recipients of the phrase, but it has snuck into actual life here and there.

I had to make the choice for me because I felt it was damaging me. More correctly, it wasn’t helping me, and it held me back from making choices. If it wasn’t fair and God or life or whatever else was just out to get me, then there was nothing I could do about it, so I might as well get angry and sit there and fume. If I realize that life just isn’t “fair” sometimes and I need to just get on with living anyway, that helps me be more productive in my response to the “unfair” circumstances.

The thing is, I don’t really want life to be fair. I have been a jerk to people often in my life. If life was completely fair, I’d be paying for that for the rest of my time here. Every cutting remark would come back to me, every lie, every time I took the bigger piece of cake, every time I broke my parents’ hearts, every time I hurt someone I loved, every time I cut someone off in traffic — all of that, heaped back on my head. No, thank you. I’d prefer that life not be fair.

The Bible teaches me that if things were fair, I’d get a lot worse, too. But the Bible also teaches me some great things about the greatness of an unfair life:

• James 1:17 (NIV) – “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” – Anything good that happens to me comes from God, and He never changes.
• 1 Corinthians 10:13 (ESV) – “No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” – “Temptation” can be read “trial” there – God doesn’t give me more than I can handle.
• Romans 8:28 (NASB) – “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” – God knows the end from whatever beginnings I am going through, and He’s promised that it is good.

So, I try. I try to understand when I can’t. I try to not worry when I can’t understand. Even with those promises staring me right in the face, I’m not always good at it, and I am sometimes really, really bad at it. I try to remember that I deserve a lot of bad stuff, and when good stuff happens… well, it’s like William Munny said:

Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.

And I’m okay with that.

I got some sort of bug this week that laid me out for most of it, causing me to miss a few days of work. The worst part, though, is that this bug ended my streak. There’s no delicate way to say this, but I hadn’t thrown up since eighth grade. I don’t know why, exactly, I just hadn’t. I’ve been sick plenty of times since then, and I’ve even felt like throwing up many times since then, I just never did. My personal theory is that I hated throwing up so much that I just decided not to do it. Apparently that only gets you so far – 23 years in my case.

Turns out I still hate it as much as I did. It’s terrifying and gross and I hate it. Worse, it’s caused me to not trust my body anymore. For 23 years, it’s been, “Hey, I might be sick, but at least I know I won’t throw up.” Now I no longer know that. If I don’t know that, what else do I not know? It might seem odd to you, but I’m on pretty unsteady footing right now.

Ah, well. I had a good run.