#3 On loving things (and doing them badly)

Writing an article a day for the next month. This one is about a metric we use to measure our lives.

Once upon a time, some friends and I were playing a game called Taboo. The game is about making your team guess the word on a card using clue words with the exception of certain taboo words.

Photo taken from boardgamehalv.com

Here in this example, the player needs to make their teammates guess the word rollerblade by using clue words other than the taboo words skate, in-line etc. The timer is running, so it’s pretty rapid.

It was my friend R’s turn. Here are the clues he gave us - love, passion, excitement. We tried guessing the word - was it lust? was it sex? crush? even power? None of these was correct.

Can you take a stab at it? What could be associated with love, passion, excitement?

The word was …. amateur.

Most of us have come to view the word ‘amateur’ as the opposite of ‘professional’ - as someone who is less than perfect, who performs less than excellently, someone casual and nonchalant. But in fact, the word is filled with fire and passion. From G.K.Chesterton’s biography of Robert Browning:

The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. . . . A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

Without any hope of doing it well.

I have come to observe that a lot of us are burdened by the idea that if we are not doing something well, then it’s not worth doing at all. We are ultimately concerned about the outcome of things. That if we spent hours running and didn’t complete the marathon then it would all have been a terrible waste of time and effort. That if we crochet a bunny and its ears come out all crooked then it has been futile and we are crochet-failures. If we loved someone and they didn’t love us back, then it was but an exercise in foolishness.

But what if in the course of training, something else had happened - enjoyement and pleasure ? what if we had enjoyed the running and training? Loved the way our muscles fired when the rubber soles hit the tarry bitumen? What if the way the crochet needle moved felt like dance or meditation? What if enjoyment of a certain process was the metric we lived by? What if the the possibility to love shows us the places our heart has the capacity to crack open, expanding in the process?