Here is what I know about wrestling: the sport selects for a particular kind of person, which is to say a person who can absorb being controlled, dominated, put on their back, and then stand up and continue. You do this in front of people. You do this when you are tired. You do this when the other person is better than you. The question the sport keeps asking is not whether you can win. The question is whether you can stand back up.
I did not understand this when Mr. Petridis told me to come to practice in the fall of 1988. I was fifteen. I understood it by spring.
The lesson I am talking about is not perseverance. I want to be careful here because perseverance is what people say when they mean something simpler and less comfortable. What I mean is this: most of the time, the thing that defeats you is not the situation. It is the story you start telling yourself about the situation while it is still happening.
I have a wrestler right now, a junior named DeShawn, who is technically skilled and loses matches he should win. I have watched him long enough to know the moment it happens. He gives up a takedown, a point he should not have given, and for approximately four seconds you can see him doing the accounting. Deciding what this means. Writing the story. By the time those four seconds are over the match is over, and the other boy has not done anything new.
This was me at seventeen. This was me at twenty-six, two years into teaching, when I was certain I had chosen the wrong profession and was composing my exit in my head during third period on a Tuesday in March. This was me at thirty-one, in Minneapolis, sitting in an apartment that suddenly had too much space in it because the woman I had followed here had gone, and I spent two weeks constructing a very detailed and not inaccurate account of what this said about me and my choices and my general trajectory.
What I did not know then was that the account, however accurate, was not useful.
Claudette told me something in our second year of marriage that I have thought about since with some regularity. We were arguing, which is to say we were communicating in the mode we sometimes use when the subject feels too large for ordinary conversation. She said, "Marcus, you are very good at understanding things and very slow at accepting them." She did not say this unkindly. She said it the way a good diagnostician delivers a result.
She was right. Understanding is the thing I was trained for. History is the study of understanding events after the fact, with evidence, with perspective, from a safe distance. What history does not train you for is being inside the event. Being inside the event and having to act before the full record is available.
The lesson, then, if I am going to put it plainly: you do not get to wait for the complete information. You get what is in front of you, and a limited amount of time, and you have to decide whether you are going to keep writing the story about what the situation means or whether you are going to do something inside the situation instead.
Adaeze is seven. She falls down with great frequency and enthusiasm, as seven-year-olds do, and what I have noticed is that she does not yet do the accounting. She falls, there is a beat, and then she gets up or she asks for help. The story she tells is short. It is: I fell. Now I am getting up.
At some point someone will teach her to extend that story. To make it mean something about her. I do not know how to prevent this entirely. What I can do is make sure she knows the story can also be short.
That is what the mat taught me, in the end. Not that pain is temporary or that effort is rewarded or any of the other things coaches are supposed to say. What it taught me is that the story you tell yourself in the four seconds after something goes wrong is a choice.
You can make it long. You can make it elaborate. You can make it true.
Or you can make it short, and stand up.
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