I Took Up Hockey Again After Twenty Years
Before this year, the last time I had slipped on my roller blades for an organized hockey game, I was barely twenty years old. As a kid in junior high and high school, I couldn’t get enough. I played in several leagues, roller and ice. And when I didn’t have league games, my friends and I would schlep our goal and all our equipment up to the church parking lot at the top of the hill overlooking our neighborhood, and play all afternoon until dinner.
And I was good. Even on ice, where I was less comfortable and the competition was stiffer, I averaged about two goals and one assist in my last season of play. On my roller blades I felt invincible. I had more hat tricks than a magician.
And then I fell away from it. Sometime in high school I found other interests and played less and less. The old flame was rekindled briefly during my freshman year in college, when I made friends in the dorm who also played. But my time off showed. I tried out for my college’s ice hockey team but didn’t make the cut. My sophomore year I studied abroad and gave no more thought to the sport. I was too wrapped up in my newfound love of travel and foreign languages.
So I finished college, went abroad again for a few years, and then came back for law school. I always stayed in shape, running and lifting weights, both habits I had picked up in high school and which I found it fairly easy to keep up with no matter which country I was in or where I was working or studying.
Then came marriage and kids. I became a stay-at-home dad, and while I still made room in my schedule for exercise, I had no time for organized sports.
Two years ago, my family and I moved back to St. Louis, where I grew up. My brothers had told me about a roller hockey league they had joined, and when one of them presented me with a hockey stick for Christmas last year, I took the hint that I had better sign up.
They say that time moves more quickly the older you get. I’ve found that to be true in a general sense. Childhood felt like a place beyond the linear flow of time, for example. I’ve heard various explanations for why we perceive time differently at different stages of life, but none of them really resonate with my experience. Maybe the longest year of my life, in terms of how it felt to me subjectively, was the year I studied abroad in China. I don’t mean it felt long in a bad way. On the contrary. I was so stimulated, so engrossed, that it was as if every moment was as full as it could possibly be.
As we get older, I think we experience the world more as a succession of intellectual categories. The more we’ve seen and done, the easier it is to just label each new experience, process it, and move on. When we’re younger, we’re still figuring things out, so we have to pay attention to more. And we feel more as a result. Thought and sensation have a kind of emotional coefficient that’s more intense during those years when we’re still fleshing out our intuitive ontology, still creating the subconscious decision trees that will guide us through subsequent challenges.
So what does that have to do with hockey? The biggest difference between playing hockey at twenty and playing hockey at forty wasn’t my stamina. Like I said, I’ve stayed in shape over the years, and can still run a 5K in less than twenty-five minutes. It wasn’t the erosion of my skills; I can still fire off a pretty hard shot. And it wasn’t a slowing of my reaction time. As a stay-at-home dad, stopping spills and catching kids before they can hurt themselves, I’ve had to cultivate Jedi-like reflexes. The biggest difference, it turned out, was how I experienced time. As a youngster I used to feel like I had all the time and space in the world. I would get the puck and just skate around everyone else. Now, everything seemed to happen so fast. I got the puck and felt this overwhelming need to get rid of it before the converging defenders could take it from me.
Sitting on the bench after a particularly disappointing shift, one of my teammates remarked, “you know, you’ve got time. Next time, take it to the net.” I knew he was right, but knowing something and feeling something are two different things, and what I needed was to be able to feel I had time.
I’ve been playing one or two games a month now for about six months. I wish I could report that I was back to playing like my younger self, fully in the moment and experiencing everything at peak intensity. But progress on that front has been partial, and fitful. I’ve managed a few goals and a few assists. But even when I’m playing well, it still feels more like I’m conforming to a game plan I’ve set for myself, rather than allowing my decisions to flow organically from the needs of the moment.
At the end of the day, my prescription for a better hockey game may be something like mindfulness meditation, to really focus on getting myself out of my head and into the game. It’s likely the rest of my daily life could benefit as well. It took coming back to hockey after half a lifetime to highlight how far I’ve gotten from the mindset that used to fill my days with wonder and awe, and what I need to do to have a chance at getting that feeling back. Even if I never score another goal, that insight will have been worth it.