But, you know, life goes on. The blank page is turned, and there is writing on the other side. And so I kept on breathing and eating and stuff, and things happened to me. I learned things.
For example:
This is the lesson of the batting cage. I thought I knew it, before, but I didn’t.
Here it is.
Something can be moving in one direction, smoothly, swiftly, something like a ball, or, oh, say, A LIFE, and then a bat swings, at the perfect moment, swings true, and hits that something, and it constricts.
Like this:
And its energy is reversed, and it fires off in the opposite direction, completely the other way to what has been, to what seems meant to be. It’s like something is doing this:
and then there’s a great shock, an explosion, an impact, and it goes like this instead:
The ball—the life, whatever—is STILL THERE. The energy hasn’t destroyed it, the impact, the explosion, hasn’t erased it from the world. It still exists, it’s just in a different place altogether.
A place it didn’t expect to end up in.
Or, you know, there is a different way to put this. You could say:
There was an order, a routine, a way in which things were arranged. Then along came something. Coyote, fate, whatever. And it takes the order and the routine, on every day the same, apart from Fridays, which are always the same as each other anyway, and it blows that routine into tiny pieces, scatters it across the skies like the chaos of the stars, and makes it into something totally new.
But here’s the thing:
The something new, it isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, in some ways, maybe it’s better.
All the time, when I batted, I felt like it was meditation, like it was control. Like, swinging the bat at the perfect time, before you even see the ball—like that was a metaphor for something, for some kind of Zen peacefulness.
What I didn’t realize was:
I got the metaphor wrong.
I was not the bat.
I was the ball.
That—that is the lesson of the batting cage.