sunday edition no. 10: effort & ease
sports as a metaphor for life, and all that.
One of the many jobs I had while in college was working at my small, historically women’s, liberal arts college’s admissions office. I gave tours, walking backwards and speaking passionately about the virtues of small class sizes, about the generous financial aid and need-blind admissions.
When applications started rolling in in the fall, teams of student employees would undertake the laborious task of “stuffing”: compiling printed and mailed materials into file folders of each applicant to be systemically reviewed by the admissions committee.
Compared to the work of tours and information sessions and hosting student overnights, stuffing was independent and monotonous work. Sorting and shuffling and stacking mountains of paper. It was one of my favorite tasks, not only because the mindless, repetitive motions did wonders for an over-scheduled, over-taxed, and over-anxious undergraduate, but also because you got the chance to read application essays.
Each year, as you stacked and stuffed and compiled the best efforts of the most ambitious high school students, you got to know them: putting names to faces on tours, application information to emails, voices on phone calls arriving as prospies with a duffel bag for a sleepover in your dorm. Scanning their application and supplemental essays was one of my favorite things, with a number of trends that still stick with me today.
My favorites were the ones that broke the mold entirely: something bold and creative and unexpected, saying less about why this college was *the only college* and more about showing (vs. telling) about the individuality of the writer. Poems, monologues, short stories, such searing use of the English language the writer explodes off the page.
Other essays took a more transparent, or formulaic approach: detailing challenges overcome, dips in grades explained, find and replace errors resulting in a passionate essay articulating why a completely different college is the only one for the applicant. Figures the writer looks up to, dreams they hope to accomplish, and of course: sports as a metaphor for life.
Occasionally, I think of the essay I submitted for my own college applications, wonder about its reception for the squadron of student workings printing and stuffing and evaluating. A self-serious high school student, I took a bit of a hybrid approach to all of the usual college application tropes, fusing sports as a metaphor for life into a creative writing exercise, answering the prompt to “describe your favorite non-musical sound”.
The sound I chose was the sound of “feathering” - the moment when a crew of rowers take the blades of their oars square out of the water and, ideally in perfect, complete unison, feather them to float perpendicular above the water as you glide forward to take the next stroke. (In this video it can be heard as the “clunk” sound when the rowers are seated with legs extended.)
The sound itself isn’t that remarkable on it’s own: a dull, repetitive clunk, followed shortly after by the splash of oars returning to the water. But when you’re in a boat, especially an 8+ boat, the sounds you hear are indicative of how well the crew is working together.
When a crew isn’t in sync, you’ll hear multiple “clunks” of the feather at different times, splashes where an unbalanced oars are hitting waves, or re-entering the water at different times. Rowing here feels like a chore, moving the oar from one places to another is a slog, fighting against the water, against the speed of your teammates and your own technique.
But when a team is working together perfectly, moving in sync, those extraneous sounds disappear. The simultaneous thunk of the feather is followed by silence, until an almost imperceptible ripple where oars re-enter the water, pushing forward as one. And, when you hit that stride, with the team moving as one, there is a glorious moment where everything just clicks into place: the boat lifts out of the water and starts to hum, gliding effortlessly. The effort turns into ease, and instead of *thinking* about being fast, you just *are*.
So, why am I making you learn about how rowing works?
While this specific phenomenon is unique to rowing, with sports as a metaphor for life, I think about it often in terms of my own life: am I in the flow, feathering and catching with grace and ease, with the work working for me? Or am I fighting the water around me, moving out of sync, scraping for every inch?
In both scenarios there is still forward progress. Extremely hard work. It’s possible to even be winning the race. But the point is that in one, something just isn’t quite in sync.
Y’all I gotta be honest with you, that’s how I’m feeling.
Recently, it’s all felt a bit like that meme that was popular in college; “grades, social life or sleep: pick two”, only its job, social life, health, fitness sleep, (other) job, friends, relationships, family, free time, or… sleep. All wonderful things, all things I willingly, happily, meaningfully pack my life with, and have done so for years. I take no pride in busyness, but I do in a life packed to the gills with purpose and meaning and joy.
But for whatever reason, over the last few months that ease just hasn’t been there. We’re certainly still making forward progress, and the purpose and meaning are all certainly present. But, to extend the overly extended metaphor here, the clunks are a-harmonious, oars bouncing off the waves instead of gliding smoothly through the air above them. The effort is not only effortful, but mentally, physically, spiritually taxing.
This has happened before, and I know it will happen again. Previous versions of myself would have pushed harder, strained longer in pursuit of the much desired lift. Today’s version of myself, older, wiser, kinder, knows that there is just as much to be gained by stopping in the middle of the lake to collect yourself and see what’s what:
In college rowing, sometimes my coaches would halt set pieces where things were off, and bring us down from all eight rowers to sixes, or days when things were especially rocky, fours. The rowers sitting out acted like training wheels, oars balanced on the water while whatever pairs of rowers worked out whatever was causing all the commotion. Sometimes it was a mismatch of pacing, sometimes an issue of technique. Often , it was just entire practices worth of frustration, each individual rower trying to fix the problem rather than leaning in to work together.
I’m doing my best to treat spring like that middle of practice adjustment. The time to put down all the frustrations and bad habits that cause everything to just feel harder, so that when I pick things back up I’m not working against myself.
There will always be effort, but there should also be ease.
a few things i’m loving, lately:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to early bird to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.