Good everything forever

Enthusiasm, belief, and a note from my hero. (And the launch of my newsletter!)

When I was on the middle school basketball team, I never played. I knew my role: from my perch on the padded seat, I’d clap and cheer, always believing we still had a chance, even if the scoreboard proved otherwise. One game, our rival was just crushing us. Coach put the subs in, and still I remained on the bench, clapping, believing. 

“Let’s go, guys!” I cheered. “We can do it!” 

Toweling off, a teammate spit, “Dude, will you shut the f— up? We don’t have a chance.” 

Enthusiasm has been at the captain’s wheel for most of my life, even as I’ve navigated the choppy seas of the world – waves of loneliness, the cynicism of adulthood, a pissy teammate losing a junior high basketball game. The wind of enthusiasm has carried me across various proverbial and literal oceans and rivers and, once, the Gastineau Channel, which I ferried in a speedboat while wearing flip-flops to get to my first day as a zipline tour guide in Juneau, Alaska. A girl I liked was doing it, plus it seemed fun. Enthusiasm! 

I co-piloted a float plane and kayaked in the sea among orcas (the girl and my ziplining career ended similarly, with two very different crashes, though they too were the result of my hurling myself into life’s onrushing gales), and when I came home flung myself into a barista career with a gusto only seen among early-aughts ex-English major writers with Bon Iver vinyls. Over coffee bars a passion for education was rekindled, and I launched into school again, into student teaching, and into the bustle of a classroom, where I taught English at a middle school. Trust that my basketball teammate was not the last middle schooler to tell me to shut the fuck up!

In all these moves and flings and pivots, I always had a belief that it was going to work out.

When my career as a middle school teacher did not, in fact, work out, some reading, therapy, and a substantially weepy visit to the woods of New Hampshire revealed that I was what the spiritual personality assessment the enneagram calls the Enthusiast: an eager, experience-seeking hoper who bounces around childlike and whimsical, glomming onto newness and connection and dreams and possibility, maybe perhaps at the expense of The Enthusiast’s fully-integrated, deeply-plumbed interior life. Even as I seek today to maneuver my life with balance, with wholeness, with attention, I long to honor the earnest enthusiast within.

This newsletter, then, will be about enthusiasms. Music and sports and creativity and more. I’ll write about people animating their lives with zest, with pizzazz and razzle-dazzle (anything with a z in it, really): artists like Charli XCX and Rosalía who’ve snatched the pop music world like a snow globe; athletes like Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ja Morant who fling themselves into life and defenders and home plate like little kids belly flopping in a pool; and myself, as I wrestle with the death of my major league dreams in college, or invent a game with my best friend that keeps our childhood alive.

I wonder if part of what we mean when we talk about enthusiasm is belief – belief in something, God maybe, or ourselves, or the little middle schooler inside us who knows that clapping along is worth it, no matter the score. Belief, as irrational as it may be, that moving to the city or opening the business or dialing their number will work out. Enthusiasm is belief embodied. Charli XCX’s petulantly playful BRAT, then, pounds out a belief in the power of a kind of snarly, knotty truth-telling – a truth shared on cement club floors or side-eyed in club bathroom mirrors. Something about Ronald Acuña’s kinesthetic swagger is a magnet to our belief in our own inherent goodness, our own capability and power. There’s belief hiding everywhere, in all our little enthusiasms.

This newsletter will amplify the voice of eighth grade Raleigh, who always believed, even to the annoyance of his peers, always determinedly and enthusiastically clapped. And it will shout from mountaintops the voice of that great lover of sports and music and life, the greatest enthusiast of them all, my hero, Bill Walton. Walton loved everything, was enthusiastic about everything, believed in everything: trees and his family and the Grateful Dead and basketball and beavers and bikes and San Diego and music and the cosmos and the Pacific Northwest and peace and just everyday people and timelessness and bears and Boris Diaw and the age of the Romantics. I loved him.

He wrote me a note once on the inner cover of his book. It was brief and kind, and ended with a nonsensical, grammatically-twisted, off-kilter, world-expanding, world-encompassing, three-word exemplar of enthusiasm and belief.

Dear Raleigh, he wrote. Happy birthday. 

Good everything forever.