On Play

Injuries, writing, working or playing.

I sprained my pinky last month rolling jiu jitsu. After an hour at urgent care, I left with a braced and taped finger and confirmation that I didn’t have any broken or fractured bones, not even a dislocation to add to my street cred. I walked away with just diminished flexion in my little finger and a real damper on my ability to type with any precision.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky: I could very easily have had much greater disruption to my routine. I can still (mostly) do everything I had done prior with only a slight additional annoyance. This is most obvious when I attempt to type. I sit here at my writing desk, pecking away with limited dexterity, my buddy-taped fingers wantonly mashing keys, adding strokes where they are not needed and forgoing them where they are. This handicap makes it harder for me to do what lately I have been enjoying most: writing.

While sitting in the urgent care waiting room, I read this piece from an essayist I enjoy, Bradley Evans. In it, Mr. Evans — a self-described “bohemian capitalist” — reckons with the epiphany that he is not a “dyed-in-the-wool businessman,” but instead, is and always has been “an artist—a writer.”

He has this realization while reading a Lyndon B. Johnson biography. Upon learning that Johnson’s father “was optimistic and opportunistic—[…tough], but unrealistic and lacking discipline in business,” he scrawls in the margin “AM I THIS MAN?”

He goes on:

That's why the realization about Sam Johnson was so massive—I am not from LBJ's maternal stock. I’m more from his father's family, which is to say, I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool businessman.

That said, I understand business. From an intellectual standpoint, I'm an A-student, Phi Beta Kappa. But from a practical standpoint, I'm a C-student—a solid 2.0 kind of guy.

Over the last two decades, I've been a stockbroker, an investment banker, and I've worked in private equity. And because I have a brain on my shoulders, I understand it thoroughly. But when you get down to brass tacks, I just don’t find it interesting, and I’m OK with that—I am finally OK with being me. Nothing about it lights a fire in my belly like Bob Dylan or Mark Twain.

Finishing the reflection, I, too, was hit with a bolt from on high. I immediately forwarded the essay to a few friends with the email subject “AM I THIS MAN?,” gradually and suddenly coming to my own realization I’ve become a writer.

So here, again, I find myself gazing out the window, composing another dispatch — just as I did last week and the week before and the weeks before that. Except this time, I’m forced to reckon with the sense of being a writer, not just of writing.

Whether or not that changes things, I can’t say. Is that an additional heft I feel as words flow to paper, or is it just the weight of a bandaged finger? Does the discomfort arise from conflicting emotions or weakened tendons? What is a sign and what is just me ascribing meaning?

As I waited outside my kids daycare the other morning, I stood watching a hawk float stationary against the breeze and I asked myself, again: was he hunting or playing? And now, I’m left wondering if these distinctions even matter.¹

1. At the urgent care, the nurse asked me how I came to have the tip of my finger hanging at such an off-putting angle, and when I told her she said, “so, you were playing…” and trailed off. I said, yes, I was playing, and she cut back in, “no, no — I meant playing jiu jitsu but then I wasn’t sure what the action was,” and I said, you were right the first time — you do “play” positions in jiu jitsu — but really, in the grander sense, I hurt myself playing.

So maybe that answers my question — maybe it’s all play.