The Mistake and The Magnet

'The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake'

The grappler at middle age. A broken stanza of a man. An incomplete sentence uttered while gasping for air. He says, welcome to my mid-life crisis.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis tells us, “The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake.”

I’m pretty good at making those.

There was the time I decided to race my Honda Accord down a winding winter road and slammed it through a telephone pole at 75 miles-per-hour. The car came to rest in a small pond of transformer fluid with live-wires draped over the driver’s side door. For some reason, I exited through the passenger door. Otherwise my friend and I would have been incinerated.

There were so many nights like this. Nights that could have irreparably altered the trajectory of my life. One in particular: The summer of 2006. Heartbroken. An awkward phase, a dark growth spurt. I had lost my first love and my band. But I was writing my own music and prose. Ideal creative circumstances. I had this naive, unshakable conviction in the inevitability of my success, outsized only by persistent feelings of immortality. Frankly, I could use both now. I also had easy access to underage booze at a local bar that didn’t card, and a pocket full of Percocet from a recent surgery.

One night at that bar, an acquaintance offered me $15 per pill. I did the math. Pretty good. But realizing I was living in a Hold Steady song, I turned him down. Not because I didn’t need the money, but because I didn’t want that sort of thing on my conscience. The acquaintance would die of an overdose some seven years later.

Selfishly, I also liked what the pills did and wasn’t in the mood to share. Each was a window of placidity, a pain mute button I could press at will.

I was doing a really good job of muting pain one night at that bar. I left at last call. A few hours of sleep and I’d be back to work in the morning. My Ford Explorer lumbered out of the parking lot and a cop pulled out behind me. The pills were doing their thing, so the import of the moment didn’t weigh on me. I just rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, driving the speed limit toward home and waiting for the lights and siren.

As I drove on, I glanced into the dim rear-view mirror, practically daring the cop to do it. We wove through the hilly roads all the way to the town limits, and the cop turned around and drove back to town. I made it home and flushed the pills, ending the dalliance. I often wonder, did that cop save me? Will he ever know?

Fast-forward approximately eighteen years. I’m smarter, but in so many ways, just as existentially stupid. Mistakes are made.

I fight, for example. For fun. Some might even say professionally, since I’m the part owner of a Jiu Jitsu school.

Fighting has been a North Star of sorts. It’s guided me when I would have been otherwise directionless. I think that’s why so many people, men and women, are drawn to Jiu Jitsu, especially in middle age. They look out at the back half of life, having lived tepidly or recklessly in the front half, and ask themselves, really? Is that it? Is that what it’s all about? Has it all been a giant, unavoidable mistake?

What am I even fighting for? What have these 37 years been about?

Hollis’ choice of the word mistake stings. My mind leaps to an electric conclusion: All of it was a waste of time.

Maybe.

Years ago I was hiking in the Adirondacks with my Boy Scout troop. This was before smart phones. We were navigating with a tattered map and a five-dollar compass. We descended into this wooded valley only to find a vast lake that wasn’t on the map. Mystified, we checked our location and confirmed that we were in the right spot. Scanning the periphery of the lake we saw the muddy, timber-littered bank of a beaver dam and drew the necessary conclusion. We took a bearing on a memorable tree and spent the next hour-and-a-half pushing through the trail-less undergrowth and timber to circumnavigate the lake.

By the time we made it back to our camp site, it was well past dark. Our clothes were caked in mud and our stomachs were empty. But we had learned a valuable lesson about competency and level-headedness. And we had a story, a sounding point in time that would prove useful later. For me, anyway. More than a few of those boys would later overdose and die. I can still see their grubby, smirking faces on the other side of the campfire flames.

Even now, my compass rendered needle-less by the turbulence of mid-life, I am confident I will find a way. I’m the guy who lives. Always have been, though I don’t like to tempt fate. Of course, someday, I will die. Allegedly. It might be before I finish this sentence or this essay. But I will die on the move.

OK, great. But where am I going? And why do I insist on pursuing mastery in such destructive arts? Writing and Jiu Jitsu aren’t that different.

There’s a beautiful scene in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where an addled Raoul Duke is fleeing Sin City. At a nameless desert crossroads, he realizes he must return to Vegas. He soothes himself by firing a Colt Python into the vastness of the desert.

“All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet,” he says. “What a fool I was to defy him.”

There are those among you who will see only the humor in this. There are others who will see the humor and feel the Magnet’s pull. You are the fellow Freaks who breathe the rarified air of a life lived in accordance with some ancient, mysterious inner compass.

I feel it acutely in this time of inner desperation. It’s amplified by my own impending return to Vegas. Last year, I returned IBJJF competition after a long layoff due to the pandemic and new fatherhood. I was a naive, new black belt and was summarily dispatched by a tall, blond Texan. The experience re-catalyzed a competitive drive in me. Mostly I’ve been losing since then.

But I must be true to the whims of the great Magnet. I must be true to what I am called to do. I must write seriously. I must train seriously. I must fight with the heart of a champion, even if I never become one.

This is not some latent Christian thing. I don’t believe there will be a revelation or even redemption in the end. It’s more Eastern. I surrender to the Magnet’s pull because there is only the Magnet. Śūnyatā. Void.

I’m an engine that runs on feeling. Some people run on logic. I envy those pragmatists, though they’d probably be the first to tell me that what I’m doing makes no sense. Selective hearing is a critical trait in dreamers of all kinds.

This is the part of the journey where a middle-aged grappler starts to feel lonesome, on'ry, and mean. It’s also when the Magnet’s pull is strongest.

Last week I was in my home gym doing an interval workout. My muscles were screaming while in an all-out sprint. Between gasps for air, I shouted obscenities at an unseen opponent. Looking up and out through the basement window, I saw a woman hastily cross the street, pulling her reluctant dog along. I don’t expect to see her on my street again.

I’ve been training seven days a week since March or April. Truthfully, I can’t remember. My hands ache. Each morning, I revive them by slowly opening and closing my palms in bed. I raise them toward the ceiling in something like an exhalation, Frances asleep beside me, and pump life back into the stiff fingers. I know that I’m burning the candle at both ends with a fucking blowtorch. But I’m just as skilled in self-deception as I am at wielding the blowtorch.

But my mind is calm and my soul is sound. It’s as if I can feel the earth slowly turning below my feet. All is well, not despite but because of the mistakes.

The lone remainder of my faith pulses through my blood vessels: It’ll be fine in the end. The Magnet’s pull will bring me where I belong.