Life Moves
In the opening scenes of Apollo 13, Jim Lovell (aka Tom Hanks) is sitting in a lounge chair in his backyard. Neil Armstrong has just stepped on the moon and astronaut Lovell is next in line. The “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” party has disbanded, and Lovell is pondering his spot in history. He squints up at his outstretched thumb playing peek-a-boo with the cratered orb of the night sky, and says to his wife, Marilyn, “It’s not a miracle, you know. He just decided to go.”
Most things of significance begin just like that. You decide. And then you jump. The rest you just sort of figure out along the way.
Most things of significance begin just like that. You decide. And then you jump. The rest you just sort of figure out along the way.
When I got the Head Women’s Basketball job at the University of Oklahoma, I didn’t have a clue about being a head Division I basketball coach. The court stuff was as natural as breathing. Basketball is basketball. But the other stuff? It was like skydiving into the abyss of night without a parachute. I remember making job descriptions for my staff and having to call around to other programs, not just to see how they divvied up all the duties, but to find out what the actual duties I was trying to divvy up were! I knew absolutely nothing about all I didn’t know. There were no files. There was no template for anything. It was one foot in front of the other blind plodding. It would have been scary, had I had time to be scared.
My zip code didn’t change the year that I went from high school coach to major college CEO, but my world burst at the seams. I went from taking attendance and grading papers to chartering planes and starring in press conferences. Life ballooned. My $7,000 Norman High School basketball budget wouldn’t even cover the cost of our yearly postage at Oklahoma. I had to learn recruiting and NCAA legislation and the landscape of a world that formed while I was shooting free throws and reading Shakespeare by an itty bitty booklight in the back of an NAIA van. Catching up on it all was like driving a convertible with no windshield. My skin felt foreign and stretched and the world was a blur. I never felt so alive.
Beginnings are like that. They are roller coaster rides full of twists and turns and 80- foot drops. And they don’t come with applicable instructions. Anybody who’s ever ventured out onto the ledge of a new start knows. The air’s just different there.
I remember standing in the driveway watching my mother drive off, two weeks after my first child was born. I stood, terrified, on the precipice of motherhood, marveling at the responsibility and the possibility that lay in my arms. And I had no idea what to do next. The moment bulged at the seams with blank spaces. I didn’t even know enough to know what I needed to ask. So I just did the next necessary thing as best I could, and made a lot of it up as I went along. Now when I look in the rearview mirror, it’s clear: part of what made it so amazing was all that I couldn’t know.
When I look back on my beginnings— my career as a college athlete, as a high school teacher, as a major college basketball coach, as a mother— I can feel the tremors, still, of every phase. I remember the apprehension, the excitement, the anticipation of what could be. My stomach knots and I wonder how I did it. How I covered such ground, how I kept such a pace. And yet the very thought of it makes my shoulders rise and square. The beginnings are the times when I have been most alive.
I find myself there, again, now. On the edge of another cliff where a sea of questions I can’t even make out are bobbing in the water below. And I’m reminded that looking too often and for too long at the unknown can be harrowing. That’s how your heels get stuck. But I’m also reminded of the exhilaration that comes when you jump. The giant vat of not knowing is where the magic lies.
Living with the covers peeled back is fabulous. It’s gut wrenching. It’s breathtaking. It’s exhausting. And it’s temporary. Thank God.
We couldn’t do it forever…stay at the beginning that is. It’s too hard, too pressing. So life moves. And it marks us with wrinkles and scars and wisdom that can only come from figuring it out as we go.
P.S.
