I played on the girls softball league in my town in grade school. It’s not something I wanted to do, or asked to do. My mother simply signed me up and I did it. Why was I doing this? A few other kids from school were doing it, and it would be good to go outside and be part of a team. My team t-shirt was too long and my hat was too big, and hung like a big foam lampshade on my head, and if my mitt could talk, it would have expressed regret that it was overqualified for the job.
I stood far out in left field, praying the ball would stick to its inner orbit and not blast off like a rocket in my direction, where it would skitter through my feet and I’d have to endure those long moments of knowing I was slowing the whole thing down, going from invisible to the frustrated focus of everyone’s attention. Then, later, I’d face the singular fear of being up at bat, standing in a cage with a person winding up to throw something at you.
Most of the time I stared up at the clouds, wishing they’d open up and drop down a golden staircase so I could climb up out of there, rather than be wound around and around like a clock (in field, out field, in field again), a single cog in the great wheel of the game.
I liked dodgeball, kickball—games you could play in shorts and sneakers and just as easily in the school cafeteria as the cul-de-sac at the end of my street, without any other protective equipment. As soon as you introduced some kind of sporting utencil (a bat, a stick), it got complicated and dangerous. I probably would have liked soccer, but never tried it, and my mother forbade me to play field hockey or lacrosse—(“We spent too much on your dental work”)—and I was relieved at that. I took up dance, where everyone was on the same team, unarmed, and facing in one direction.
Not to say I’m not competitive, because I am. I’ll outwalk people on the street, just because I can, dodge and weave and skirt around them in this big human video game of a city. It makes you feel like maybe you’re ahead of the game, with the added value of being efficient.
When my friend Rachel invited me to join the co-ed touch football team a few years ago that she and a bunch of our friends were part of, in an actual touch football league, with t-shirts and everything, I panicked. No, no, no. Not me. But have fun!
I begged off for several seasons. The idea of re-entering the world of formal sports at this age, in a game whose rules I did not know was terrifying, especially when it would require putting myself in the path of people running hard in my direction.
Then one spring she insisted. I was the only friend of the group who wasn’t doing it, and quite frankly, they were down a girl.
Fine. I’ll try it. Except that now I’m over 40 and haven’t ever sat and studied an entire football game, let alone played, and I’m going on whatever pieces I’ve gathered from half-watching the Superbowl in a room full of people, and one lesson over tacos in which my friend Kristina explained the basics of who throws what where and what you’re supposed to do about it.
Want to know what it feels like to take your place on the field at the start of a game you have no idea how to play? Then go backstage at the Bolshoi ballet, throw on some tights, and walk out onto the stage with them and strike a pose just as the curtains open.
I might as well have been a bony-kneed sixth grader in a too-long t-shirt and a big dumb mitt on one hand. But you make it through one play and then another, and sometimes the ball will come in your direction, and if it does, try to catch it. What’s striking, I learned, is how often the game has absolutely nothing to do with you—it arcs and contracts and revolves around you in its own galaxy of activity, and most of the time you just get caught up in it, but have little impact on how it turns out.
To date, I’ve played for six seasons. If this game were a restaurant, I’m the busboy who speaks little English; while I can’t follow all the high-end strategy and jargon, I know my job and when I see an opportunity to perform it, I can do it sufficiently, and sometimes well.
So while I can’t tell you the name of a single play or what down this is (or why it matters) or, sometimes, even the score, I have a pretty good idea of how the whole thing starts, but not how it ends. That’s where the excitement lives—in a game, and in anything: There are rules, there are boundaries, and the rest is simply up in the air. You have at once full control over what you’re about to do, and yet, no clue as to the outcome. It’s a mix of people and agendas and egos and split-second decisions and someone with their eye on the clock.
I’ve found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time, missed a ball by hundredths of an inch. Run headfirst into another player, sending me straight to the ground in a black sea of stars. Been pushed, shoved, and even taunted by a grown woman who, under any other circumstances I’m pretty sure wouldn’t talk to me that way (and I, under other circumstances, wouldn’t have told her she was a “little bitch.”)
I’ve been surprised at how emotionally involved I can be in a game I honestly care nothing about, how my competitive urge can light up like kindling in a single stroke and set my temper ablaze. (“Terri, do you want to sub out for a bit?” “No. No I’m fine.”) I’ve been knocked around pretty hard, and most recently sprained a toe thanks to a big clumsy guy on the other team who didn’t watch where he was going. I missed the playoffs.
But I’ve also been in just the right place at the right time, locked onto the quarterback like a tractor beam, and when the ball soared my way, it felt as if I’d plucked it right out of thin air.
I was laid off from my job at the magazine at the tail end of 2011. A welcome end to a near-decade run as a magazine editor. If I wasn’t asked to leave, I probably would have left anyway. It was a game I already knew the rules to, and I just didn’t want to play anymore.
I’ve been running my own business, a branding consultancy, for more than six years. But if you think I know how any of that works, either, you’re kidding yourself. Running your own business, to my mind is simply this: servicing several clients or customers, instead of serving one boss. And I challenge any entrepreneur or business owner to claim they have a bead on exactly how it will happen. The rules are pretty loose.
That doesn’t mean you don’t find a way to make what you do sustainable, and not willy nilly, and you definitely need to know your boundaries, but you really do learn it as you go—more often from doing it wrong than doing it right.
Whether it’s football or entrepreneurship or making lasagna, you get better with practice. In the beginning, I used to just run aimlessly and then stand there, midfield, wondering where the ball would go—it was a few games before I learned not to wait, but initiate, to run a route, some short sprint of a plan to get somewhere on purpose.
The goal with football or with work is, interestingly, the same: Run hard in a direction, and make yourself open to the right opportunities. You learn that offense scores points, but good defense wins games. And most of it you make up as you go along.
I was surprised at myself for picking up coed touch football at my age, but I guess I’m not that surprised, and I don’t want to be too proud of myself, either—after all, it’s what I’ve been doing all along. Showing up just a little late to a sport and guessing my way through. It’s still scary to step onto that field, but I understand now what my goal really is: Sure we’d all love to win, but even that goal is a little shortsighted.
The real reason, to do or play or work at anything, is to make a habit of facing possibility and risk, in equal measure; to trust a blend of intuition and insight to get you where you need to be. And when you can do that—while depending on your team, and showing up for them regardless, you win more often than not. And if not, you all go for a beer afterwards and it’s all good. There’s always next week.