Process as passage
I’ve been drifting in and out of light this week.
In the mornings, as the sun lifts up out of the pink of the east, tips into the front windows and spills down the hall. A slow, warm collision with my bare feet on the floor, I linger and stall for no real reason than the dust motes do, to hang and to drift.
When the afternoon wanes the sun courses down the side of the neighbour’s house, warming the old brick to persimmon and pomegranate in alternating patches that makes our bedroom glow.
And in the evenings, stretching later now, before the sun crashes behind the apartment complex to the west it floods the kitchen, honeyed light on drying dishes stacked beside the sink, bananas going spotty. In the hall the light reverses, refracting through the bathroom’s glass bricks, spanning soft across towels on their hooks and probably me, back in the same place to greet it that I was ten (??) hours before.
Light after winter, even one as warped and meltingly quick as this one was, always takes me gently by the shoulder and shakes. I can feel a different part of my brain switch back on, I remember the dormant parts of my body as they slowly stretch awake. But this spring’s light — whether I’m noticing it because in the province’s 3rd stay at home order I have nothing better to do or because I can feel my mood strapped right against it, lifting, lambent, still pretty tender — is much more insistent.
The coach called me back from a parking lot in Phoenix. They’d just finished practice, he apologized, and now he was walking in dry evening heat, talking to me about tape before the team’s curfew took effect.
I was straining to hear the sounds behind his voice, my brain and body desperate for the stimulus of some other place, even a parking lot in downtown Phoenix, wide open sky shifting to powder purple. My imagination already out to Camelback Mountain, jutting abruptly up from the flat packed red ground around it. Was I calling from Canada? He asked. I blinked and came back to myself, sitting at the small kitchen table. He joked he couldn’t pick up on any accent, almost seemed disappointed. Maybe we were both doing the same thing.
There is something very comforting to me, especially now, about process. Which is what the call was about as much as what it settled into. A glancing window into a moment so personally specific that each divergent thread has to be traced and gathered up to reconstruct it.
We were talking about players improving their physical game. A process that turns out to be almost metaphysical in the way the brain has to break down what the body is doing, before the body even tries to improve itself in motion. It starts abstract, a player watches themselves on film and catalogues all the ways their body is betraying them, even as they compulsively flinch and move along with what they are seeing. The body becomes an unreliable witness to itself.
The process is slow. Habit becomes distraction. When it’s finally time to translate it to the floor it goes like a Simon Says game. Pop a hip. Curve the spine. Lower this shoulder. Now you might be able to put two steps together. Like anything, the best teacher turns out to be failure. Of not getting out to a corner, or square under the basket, seeing the ghost of yourself there instead as the ball switches hands and everyone goes tearing the other way down the court.
I always think about what Zion was asked to do. Relearn how to run so he could relearn how to jump and land. Relearn how to read his own body, make himself more pliant to the relentless crush of gravity, ease himself into a more enduring explosiveness. Stick around in a game where he is still talked about as an anomaly, abstractly, his body made separate, instead of an entirely new universe.
And all we were talking about was one body in one part of one pick and roll defence. A blip of a star in the gravitationally bound galaxy of process.
I like deconstructing process because it attempts to demystify feeling. Body feeling, like muscles moving over bone, or emotions spilling over because of the way light falls on something just so. Maybe you’ll never do it but in setting out each step you are, however briefly, inside a different life, your body borrowing the bare movements. There was a duality in what the coach was telling me, how he saw every step from where he stood outside the play, every player in motion around the guy he was focused on, and how his own voice sped up in the explanation. Listening to him my brain split three ways: to him in the moment, maybe pacing with the phone pressed against his face, to his memory of the play, vivid, quick and physical, and to the player we were talking about, who had described the same thing to me a few days prior as best he could, a pin in the centre of the plan itself.
Writing can be like that. When I lose myself in something and read it back later, no idea where it came from, I can at least trace out the conditions. Memory, too. It’s why on the phone with someone I’ve never met, over 3,500 km away, my lungs could remember what dry desert air inhaled hard and fast felt like and longed for it.
It’s why I’ve been printing out travel photos taken on my phone and framing them, why I hung this one up over the kitchen sink, a wholly fake window that mimics the real one from my friend’s kitchen, a few blocks away from where I stopped, sweating and happy, to take the picture.
Something I meant to get around to, or maybe seemed too obnoxious a year ago, but lining them up on the walls now I can remember the quality of light, the weight of the air, the sounds, the pulse of a place under the second captured and where else my body stood besides loitering at home, chasing shadows. Process like memory cracked open, offering infinite passage standing still.