Bull Durham is probably one of my favorite sports movies. It was released in 1988 and was responsible for bringing Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon together. In the early 2000s there was a span of maybe three years during which I was really into baseball, or as into baseball as an eight year old can be (which is enough). I’m not sure if I ever saw the whole movie but I never grew out of baseball metaphors. When I think about Bull Durham, there is always a specific line that comes to mind:
A good friend of mine used to say, “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.” Think about that for a while.
The first time I gave it thought coincided with the shaky still-birth of my adolescent love life. In a typical fit of being myself, I refused to admit defeat when it came to all my failed romances. I brushed off my rejections as canceled games on rainy days. I had not won, sure, I recognized that, but I also felt, in the way an idiot who is let off softly by a “kind” romantic interest with phrases like, “you’re too smart for me,” or “I’m just not ready for a relationship right now,” or, my favorite variation of that, “I just can’t be with you right now, it just wouldn’t be fair to you” (—this last giving the illusion of some mythical moment in the future when a relationship could blossom), that I had not lost.
But I did. I lost. I lost a lot and in self-pitying and oblivious ways only losers lose.
It turned me into what scientists would call a “crazy bitch.” Much like the main character in Aronofsky’s Pi, or a particularly annoying theist, I saw significance everywhere. I wrote letters. I cried in showers. I read for deeper meaning in text messages (which I know is a common thing to do —but that does not make it any less insane and inane). I wove a complex matrix of theories as to why things did not work out for me using what I learned in AP psychology as my tools. I made every conversation an object of critical analysis best left for the kinds of books everyone talks about but nobody (willingly) reads. I call it a happy accidental exercise in useful thinking, albeit grossly missplaced useful thinking.
Only recently have I come to reevaluate how I feel about that baseball cliche, the whole thing about winning and losing and unforseeable rain. Basically, our interaction with other people is a ball game; we toss ideas and body language at each other and we catch them from each other. Sometimes we win a friend, sometimes we lose a friend, whether to circumstance (rain) or choice (how we play the ‘game’).
It’s simple mechanics. While we are complex people and some of us are manipulative, some of us do harbor ulterior motives, and let’s be fair, we all do at some point with some unlucky person or persons, the simplicity of our interactions cannot be taken away. The problem, my problem, has always been making things less simple than what they are.
There are a lot of subjects that people need to really overthink. Matters financial, political, philosophical, sociological, metaphysical, spiritual —we could all use sitting down and really questinoing ourselves periodically about how much we know and why we believe in some of what we know but not other parts or all of what we know.
But when it comes to our personal lives and the individuals who come in and out of them to fulfill romantic or platonic social roles, overthinking is the last thing we need. I don’t think I have ever met someone who can actually avoid doing it, though.
