DREAM, DRIVE AND DRUDGERY

Starting five weeks ago in Rome, Italy, I was involved in or responsible for basketball camps for four straight weeks. You find a rhythm with these things after about two weeks of standing constantly and instructing young athletes with waning and/or fluctuating attention spans. You also come to expect that each week will bring the dull roar of teens and kids running through the gym, firing basketballs at a basket 40 feet away. It becomes customary to see the kids wearing your t-shirts or those of the organization sponsoring the camp. It short, each summer there’s a familiarity that grows between myself and the camp environment. The only difference this year is that now my mortgage is ridin’ on camp.

I’ve been making my paycheck this summer and for the last 10 months through basketball training and naturally this has changed my orientation to the world of youth sports. And I wouldn’t say the orientation has gone septic. When I’m on the basketball court instructing, speaking, encouraging, chastising…nothing else matters. It’s all about the kids. But when you go home in the evening, lay down to sleep, wake up the next morning and prepare to start a camp that you’re not sure will even happen, that’s the different part. In the moments leading up to that fifth week of camp there is real concern. Camp matters now on more than just existential levels. It matters practically and when it doesn’t happen, I’m noticing that a very real bout with self-efficacy ensues.

The thing you value most, the message that embodies the virtues and pillars of character, is being stifled. At least that’s how I felt this week when camp didn’t happen. And it’s not a sob story. It’s more internal and introspective than that. I reckon it’s impossible to give your being to a craft and disseminating it only to encounter resistance that just happens to also equate to you possibly not paying your bills. The point is that this mike marker in my journey is teaching me how to maintain a focus on what matters most and understanding that I may have to be willing to share it through methods I don’t particularly prefer. For instance, you may want to sell cupcakes in your own cozy little storefront just off the walk amidst the high rises downtown but instead have to settle for working at the bakery selling assembly line pastries. You can still be you in that environment but let’s be honest, who wants to?

At any rate, where life, career and aspiration collide, I’m learning that you must acquire the fortitude to forge ahead and sometimes share your 86,400 seconds a day with an activity that you feel mutes YOU. In due time you’ll be able to do business on your own terms.