Indulgence

A week in the Netherlands and its standard of care, and the conflicting excesses of NBA playoff basketball.

Landing at Schiphol, a big grey heron beats its wings slow alongside the plane over the marshy land weaving in and around the tarmac. The flaring green grass a contrast against the low grey clouds.

Through the week I’ll learn of the bird’s commonality. A ubiquitous presence around Amsterdam’s canals, ponds, parks and markets; stalking for scraps, balancing precariously on street lamps, tangling with one another overhead. No less impressive to me but themselves a bit dingy, street-scuffed. They, like the swans, white storks, Egyptian geese and white billed, sooty coots, will keep me craning my neck to trail them, even while I’m atop a bicycle and swerve into oncoming lanes.

An indulgence, a novel one, but then Amsterdam — against my North American framework — seems to me like a city full of the courtesy of attention. Really, the Netherlands at large. Thoughtfulness of experience from the very routine and mundane (your commute, errands, infrastructure, day-to-day matters of living), to enrichment (parks, flora, food, art, opportunities for person-to-person exchange), to existential livelihood (the feeling of security, of being entirely considered, all this brings with it).

I wonder how long that feeling of indulgence lasts before it eases into expectation, a standard. How indulgence only feels that way against what we don’t consider essential, an anomaly of living even if it’s in service of life.

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The NBA playoffs are the season and the league’s peak indulgence. Think of the commonly held belief that the game itself improves in the postseason, the reflexive practice of so many more people to watch because of that belief.

The term “casual”, whether derogatory or self-appointed, is indulgent by nature. To be casual instead of dedicated is what keeps hobby from practice or profession, from work, and a hobby asserts the free time with which to pursue it. It’s casuals above all others who tune into games during the playoffs and crank the those broadcast ratings up.

The schedule, one-on-one-off, is considered indulgent in contrast to the regular season. In fandom too, what a relief it is to be able to zero in on games one series at a time. The first two days of the playoffs are all day affairs that assume people will stay put in their homes to watch, hardly straying from their couches other than to refill bowls and glasses.

Backdropping all of this is the commonly held understanding that there’s no more important, more serious time for an athlete. That these games are what an arduous 82-game regular season was for. To not take the playoffs seriously is less a stain than a moral conviction, if absent in an athlete it suggests something seriously amiss in the competitive fibre, the reason for professional being of that person. We allow a few exceptions — a first-time playoff team, a young team — but those allowances are only given on the assumption that a team will make it their duty to be back here again.

Though not nearly as explicit, injury in the playoffs takes on the language of indulgence. That a team “cannot afford” for a player to be injured, that a star might “risk” injury. To sit, to rest, to seek a second or third diagnosis eats into time a team may not have. Time, spent this way instead of in languorous preparation for the next game by studying film and prepping the body, switches to the selfish sort of indulgence.

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In the Kunstmuseum, after I make the requisite rounds of all the special exhibitions and permanent pieces, I circle back to Monet’s ‘Wisteria’.

I’ve never seen it before, not in digital or any reprint. The size of the painting, the at first glance loose wash of colour that renders more solidly the longer I look, the silence of the museum, the enclave where the painting is hung with its built-in tiled bench emerging right out of the tiled, knee-high wall corralling the painting, all of it forcing me to sit and look. Indulge.

I get up, tilt my head, take a few steps back, get right up to the canvas, then sit down again. I feel my breath slow but my pulse hammer, happily.

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Some fractious comments on last week’s newsletter started me thinking about indulgence. The comment was that I “couldn’t help myself” from offering a political opinion, and that read as indulgence because it was outside of my wheelhouse which is, ostensibly, just basketball.

There are two sides to this coin.