There’s a phenomenon in soccer where when a team is up they shift the game to a form of keep away. The goal is not to score but to prevent the other team from having any opportunity to score. In other words, they aren’t striving to increase any form of lead, dominance, or assertion. They’re settling in. They are just hanging on to the lead. Yesterday I was at a wrestling meet watching my kids struggle through their matches. The eldest was winning for a bit and then wound up just trying to hang on and not get beat. My other wrestler took an early and commanding lead and just sort of settled in and tried to hold on to the kid until time ran out. Moments later I witnessed an exchange between two dads who were watching the event. One asked the other how he was doing and the other replied, “you know, just hanging in there.” His friend agreed that this is what he was doing as well. All of this settled in on me like acid, burning through the thick coat of complacency that is suburban life. This morning I finally recognized I do not like my life.
Not any of it.
For a while I’ve been comparing my life to the Todash darkness of Stephen King lore. Everything feels just slightly askew as if I could settle into this form of living and be perfectly complacent, but everything would be just perfectly wrong. I woke up thinking that this isn’t an entirely new feeling. In truth everything has always been wrong, and I’ve settled into this wrongness the way a frog supposedly settles into a heating kettle, never knowing it is being murdered until it is already dead. Well, I’m not dead yet, but I recognize more and more who the murderer is.
Me. Society. The expectations of suburban life. Dramaturgy. Call it a group killing–The Following writ large and true. So, now what? I can’t answer that yet, but my eyes are open. I’m done with the sleepy-eyed beckoning of ‘just hanging in there’ for that is no way to live a life. That, at least, is a strong first step.