Cheaters and spoilsports

When it's all messed up

Part one’s about me. Part two’s about our state of existence.

How the writing retreat started, how it’s going.

Greetings from St. Louis! I’m here for two weeks. We’re visiting one of our favorite families. While four out of five of our combined kids are at Shakespeare camp during the day (the fifth one’s in an opera, fancy), I am holing up in various places around town to write. The goal is first drafts of the 24 essays that will frame Play Book. And how is that going? Let me tell you.

Monday did not go well. I’d built up some high expectations, and didn’t want to get behind. I had planned to work in a co-working club like I do in Nashville, and apparently Switchyards has spoiled me. There was no decaf coffee at this place. I have found that drinking copious amounts of decaf provides sufficient caffeine, lots of reasons to get up and walk around––coffee in, coffee out–– and still lets me sleep at night. There were fluorescent lights instead of natural lighting, the chairs were wonky, and apparently I have become a diva this year. Or more generously, I have developed a groove. Become a creature of writerly habit. So, on to a coffee shop which, while lovely, was a pricey option for staying all day. And then, finally! The St. Louis Central Library. Absolutely gorgeous architecture, beautiful light, work tables everywhere, and a librarian named Lisa in the religion and philosophy room who lives to connect books with people. So, I found a home base.

St Louis Central Library. A work of art, artists at work.

Even so, I was off of my groove. I chose a tough topic for beginning: Cheaters and Spoilsports––and just ground my gears with no oil. My head game was off. Beautiful location, swaths of time: what was wrong with me? I have 24 essays to write and this is a great chance, don’t waste it, said the worry in my head. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when my inner critic starts talking it calls for trying softer, not harder.

So, I examined the situation. Not excuses, but triage. For one thing, I’d had trouble finding a place. For another, I was getting a ton of texts from home about Stuff going on. And for a third, as a commenter recently reminded me : the only job of a first draft is to exist. Tell me again, and again, and again.

So, I gave myself a pass and called Monday a “settling in day”. New space. New headspace, new amenities, new groove. I found a gorgeous cathedral and drank in the beauty, listened to the trickling baptismal font, prayed and wrote in my journal a while. Not about my essay, about the things pinging around in my head and heart. Call it a day, bless it.

Take two.

Tuesday was better. Much better. I had a bit of the lay of the land in this new-to-me town, and remembered, before writing, that I am a whole human being. Just like the YMCA motto: Mind, body, spirit. I walked to the cathedral first, then headed straight to the library. I skipped over the Cheaters and Spoilsports essay and moved on to Play Takes Risks. Wrote, wrote, wrote. Then I walked again. And went to another cathedral. There’s something about just walking into a cathedral off the street, no questions asked. La la la, the draft exists. That’s all it has to do. Exist. It doesn’t have all the quotes, all the insights, all the elegant thought bridges. It exists. Move along, nothing to see here.

But today (Wednesday), because I didn’t want to hate what I did Monday, I went back to Cheaters and Spoilsports with a little more gentleness and I started by calling up Sophie Killingley who’s illustrating Play Book. I kicked out some of my ideas about what those are, we told some stories, and I remembered why I thought it was important to bring them up in the first place.

How everything in the world started and how it’s going.

So, to recap, here are the distinctions between cheaters and spoilsports: cheaters, as messed up as it is, break the rules because they really want to win the game. Spoilsports, on the other hand, mess everything up for everyone if they can’t win. They’ll flip the board, they’ll break the magic circle of play so nobody gets to enjoy it.

On Monday (settling in day) I got kind of in the weeds around this idea because I went from thinking about the distinctions between cheaters and spoilsports down a backstory kind of rabbit hole. Why do cheaters cheat? (If you google this, be prepared for pages of posts about the psychology of relational/marital infidelity. Which speaks loudly.)

But really, I asked a question I knew the answer to. We cheat in life because we are broken, because we want more, because we are unsatisfied, because we think we deserve more, because we care more about ourselves than others, because we’re desperate… Think of any deep, unsatisfied human longing. That’s why people cheat. Because we want something, at any cost, rules be damned.

And as for the attitude and motivation of spoilsports: if I can’t have it, nobody can. I will spoil it. I do not want you to have the good thing I don’t have. It’s a lack of respect for the game itself, and for the players.

I heard someone comment the other day that intelligent people procrastinate by doing research. First, I took the compliment. I love when people think I’m smart. But also: ouch. Yep. So, I dug into all that, really, because I couldn’t quite find a mental foothold. Eh. Moving on.

When I started chatting with Sophie I realized that, for the purposes of this book–– at least for the purposes of a first draft––that’s probably all I need to say about what cheating and spoilsporting is. For this book, I think it’s more important to spend time on the fallout.

It didn’t take long talking with Sophie to start talking about the things that are wrong with the world: the world we’re creating art in, raising children in. Because we’re living in a world that’s broken, that’s gotten spoiled, that isn’t fair, there’s seldom a straight line from actions to consequences, and it just feels wrong. This week I’ve sat in beautiful empty cathedrals and I’ve walked past people sleeping on the sidewalk.

So how do we play when the game is off? When the playground has dirty syringes and the slide isn’t safe? When people break the rules and flip the board over? We can feel it in our bones: this isn’t right. So really, the next emphasis in the book, after cheaters and spoilsports, for the moment, is on what happens when it all goes wrong.

I have a poem that’ll be in the book about this moment where I felt deeply how wrong the world is, how deeply we are at odds with it. My husband Kenny Hutson and I used to play music together more, early in our marriage, and we were on tour in Colorado. Wayyyy back in the early 2000s, we didn’t have iPhones yet, and so we would look up our routes on a website called Mapquest and then print them out. One time we were in Gunnison, Colorado and heading to Paonia, Colorado for our next show. The map said that it was eighty miles away, and that it was going to take three and a half hours. What in the world? We soon found out that we would be traveling around the rim of the Black Canyon. With just a guardrail between us and a 2000 foot drop, my palms were sweaty, my breathing shallow. Kenny, amazed at the view, offered to drive. Thanks, but no thanks. That would mean that I would have had to drive even closer to the edge to pull over. No way.

I prayed as I drove, and had this visceral sensation that it was wrong that I’m at odds with gravity. I started verbally processing about this whole idea which freaked Kenny out for a minute, me getting all philosophical about gravity while driving around a canyon. My hands were still on the wheel, and I was definitely staying in our lane. I had no desire to become a test subject. But the theology in my head was locking into my body. God made the world good, made us good. And then it broke, it was broken. The world can hurt me, and that is wrong.

You guys, I think this train of thought includes everything. God made everything good, and also, now everything is broken from atom to atmosphere. Including physics. In the negative, it means that the physical word can hurt us. Which is to say, if we didn’t die before everything went wrong, then our relationship with gravity was not antagonistic. We wouldn’t die from an encounter with gravity.

(Pete, if you’re reading this: I still don’t know about when animals started killing and eating other animals. I have questions.)

I’m not saying this means we could fly. But I hope it means that. Maybe we will just fall with style. But if gravity’s not going to be a problem anymore when God makes everything right again, I feel hopeful.

Falling with style.

At the risk of jumping way ahead, let’s talk about Jesus and his new body after he dies and death starts working backwards: it gets real interesting. My pastor a few weeks ago said it’s kind of like he’s playing catch me if you can: walking through walls, showing up places, then other places very far away… I don’t think Jesus would have rolled like that right in front of us and given us eyes if he didn’t want us to wonder about it. It is good to get curious about things like this.

I realize it looks like an awfully big leap from cheating and spoilsports to flying. But is it? Seems like an easy thought-wormhole to wiggle through. And I think that has everything to do with play. And thinking playfully––wondering and what-iffing about what we do know and what we don’t or can’t–– tends to make new synapses fire about big stuff.

So then: if we, deep in our souls and DNA are made to traverse this world as those in harmony with it, in care of it, taking deep pleasure from it and stewarding it, then it’s good to name the frustration of being out of sync with it. It’s off. It’s hard to riff when the tempo’s off, it’s hard to paint during earthquakes.

So, we’re in a world that’s amazing and awful. People play the hero and the villain, often a breath apart. People cheat to win, and people flip the whole damn board over in frustration and despair.

And that makes it hard. And it’s hard, among other reasons, because we are made to freaking fly.

Updates

• We have our next live interview guest! I am delighted that Dr. Brian Edgar, author of The God Who Plays, will join me for a live discussion on Monday night, June 23rd at 7 pm Central Time, all the way from Melbourne, Australia. Brian has become a real friend and mentor in the process of this book, and his book is by my side all the time. Paid subscribers can join us live and add comments and questions in the chat, and I’ll post the interview afterward. You are so very invited.

  

• I’m deep in the essays, and Sophie’s generating things on her front. I can’t wait to show you some. Onward, all the time, for these two weeks in St. Louis!