ANSWERS

The other night I was warming up for my Advanced Beginner pickleball liveball session when I stopped suddenly and marched over to our coach.

“Mancini,” I said, standing up straighter. “I think I’m ready to play in the Intermediate liveball session tomorrow.”

“Hmmmmm,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “You’re getting better but let’s see how tonight’s session goes before we decide.”

I should have enjoyed the next 90 minutes, playing a new sport I love with new friends I love - i.e., basking in the moment - but I didn’t (couldn’t).

Just thirty or so minutes in, after a particularly skillful win, I sidled over to her.

“So,” I said, smiling expectantly. “Did I make it into Intermediate?”

And this condition of mine is in no way limited to pickleball. I have a chronic need to know the outcome of everything - big or small - the moment it crosses my mind or path: in dating I’m either immediately all in or he’s “not my guy”; with work I need to know what I’m going to be when I grow up, i.e., when is it all going to LAND, goddammit?; frantically crossing off my to-do list, only to add more items of busy work; planning trips (and projecting) months in advance; wondering where I am going, where I am supposed to BE, literally and figuratively, always.

In other words, I always want the answers…sometimes before I know what the question is. 

I am constantly jumping in and “doing” with some goal in sight, no matter how vague it may be, slicing through the water across the pool to get to the ladder on the other side. 

But to what end? Because once things happen, there are other things I want to happen cropping up like dandelions all over my nice green lawn. And so the lather of my churning continues and expands until I look like a human mushroom cloud, or a tornado. 

I’m a reformed control freak…who apparently isn’t all that reformed. Yes, compared to years past where I had a stranglehold on my reality and perceived future, I have lightened up and let go and I do live in the moment more than I ever have before, which is progress. And for me, as a super curious and super intense person, there really is fun and gratification in the finding and in the seeking.

Answers - definition, parameters - are also such a sense of comfort and security and belonging. The searching for them is a salve to that untethered-ness of life we all feel, especially me after my recent big move to LA and near-constant life changes over the last couple of years (not including Covid!). 

But I’ve come to realize that there aren’t really answers, per se: the real and important things in life actually happen along the way, in tiny little pieces and increments, almost without me even seeing them.

Pivotal moments occur and you don’t even realize they’re happening - just like we don’t always learn our lessons in the moment. Looking back, we can see the path, though.

Mel Robbins wrote recently, “A secret to happiness is letting every situation be what it is instead of what you think it should be and then making the best of it.”

So instead of seeking answers all the time, I continue trying to at least micro dose on a “right here, right now” focus: I’m doing everything I can, yet it’s also important to do nothing, and especially to know nothing. And make the best of all of it. 

Like I wrote in a recent blog on Change, “I belong everywhere and nowhere. I belong to everyone and no one.” Those lines came to me in what was kind of a low moment, when I was in the throes of seeking yet more answers on a number of things.

Then almost immediately, I came across some words from Maya Angelou: “You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”

Freedom as the ultimate “answer”? I’ll take it.