Hockey Cures All Ills

I saw my first hockey game, and everything changed.

Archives for June 2018

Weightless

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This post was not supposed to happen now. But, events in real-time must interrupt the previously scheduled, a bit of a Princess Bride moment, as you wish. I must be that inquisitive child, because only then can the heart of this story come through.

Once upon a time a woman no longer young, recently wronged by a wicked prince, had looked at ice as if for the first time and found that it was magic. It asked of her the impossible, and if she didn’t exactly perform its requests perfectly, she did them joyfully and consistently. And her heart grew strong in each new challenge the ice asked of her.

But challenges not of the ice started shouting, and they asked darker questions. When she answered, she also did her best, but their magic drained her. To withstand these darker demands, she shut down her strong heart, without even knowing it. There was too much to lose if she let herself feel the pain, but she only knew this later.

What she did know, what she did see, was that the ice had lost its magic. She stopped listening to its call for longer than she realized–days, weeks, months, 2015 almost through 2016. Her skates stayed covered, her stick feigned furniture in a corner, a talisman rendered mute and useless.

As is often the case with magic and joy, she only began to understand what the ice required after she had fled the darkness to a place no longer haunted, one not cased by wolves. Instead of screeches from buses and feral neighborhood children, she heard conversational geese and saw once again her constant childhood companion, the redwing blackbird. The deep darkness in this refuge overlooking water brought her every star, every night she ventured out her door.

Childlike, with an open heart in the protection of this star-canopied home, she heard the ice call to her again. And as she answered, her heart fully open, she knew that she could do anything it asked. And she did. Despite the mountain of boxes, the skates, her stick, were never fully packed away. She found a rink nearby and resumed the conversation.

As she moved forward, it wasn’t that she didn’t get bogged down in the darkness of others, especially people she cared about. She did. But, when that weight shifted toward her, she now pushed it back. She chose to keep her heart open, a decision requiring determination in an age weighted by distraction, comparison, and everyone else’s expectations and opinions on every single thing a person might ever consider doing.

And she is not the only one. Amazing things happen when you choose to play to win, instead of defaulting to play not to lose. You can set a city on fire with your heart, dance in fountains, win over the suspicious and jaded.

How many times can you hoist the Stanley Cup over your head? Ovi certainly makes those 35 pound-overhead presses look easy. Joy is weightless, apparently. And contagious. The one with the open heart wins. Choose to make your own joy, pass that along. Everyone wins.

The Beginning

Shifts

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In an interview before Stanley Cup game one in Las Vegas, TJ Oshie was asked if the Capitals could practice Vegas’s fast start to prepare. His answer touched on the game’s speed and unpredictable nature: “You can’t really emulate a game in practice like you would think you would be able to. The game is too fast, too physical to try to simulate in practice.”

His response got to the heart of something I noticed the first time I saw a hockey game. When things happen in hockey, they happen fast, without warning, and the only thing you can do is stay fully present and ready to adjust.

When you play hockey, you know things will change in unpredictable ways with uncommon speed. But when we live our lives, we often are led to believe that a plan can protect us, that we are mostly in control, that we can emulate and prepare, that we have our five-year increments to follow. People who believe this are football fans.

From the first moment of the first game I ever saw I was a hockey fan because its action unfolded the way my life has: a game plan out the window because of sudden and often painful circumstances, where adjustments required grace and intuition, and faith that the hockey gods would at least not work against me, even if they didn’t exactly seem to be helping. Strokes, cancer, heart attacks, job loss, divorce, death—affecting me or mine, out of the blue, a series of dizzying phone calls, each shifting my balance, forcing a play I had not anticipated.

Facing less, others have given up. Others are not hockey players.

Those who play balance on the edge, poised completely in the moment, whatever it happens to be and however unforeseen. They fall, they bounce up. They bleed; they do not care. They never stop moving until they step aside for teammates who have their own next shift to play.

Ernest Hemingway saw this grace under pressure in bullfighting. I see it most perfectly embodied among these ice warriors, who draw blood and spill their own, dodge their opponents or collide with them as the play demands, find balance amid a maelstrom that never stops.

People wonder why this particular Capitals team, after offseason upheaval, has made it to the finals where previous, more successful squads fell short. I do not. I have seen them all season flourish through disaster, turn adversity to their advantage, and persevere one period at a time. They stick to their game. They live in the moment. They thrive in uncertainty while certain they can handle whatever flies at them.

They believe. We believe. A city shifts.