The Olympics are hard for me

Humboldt, volleyball, the bardo, and the unifying principle of life—via the Olympic games

In Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature, she writes about Alexander von Humboldt’s piecing together of a complex and beautiful concept we now call “nature.” His life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when “scientists” (put in quotes since the word for, and concept of, a scientist didn’t yet exist back then) and the many fields of science were separated into the distinct factions of biology, zoology, chemistry, botany, and so forth. But Humboldt was among the first to see beyond those artificial separations and tease out something deeper: “Behind variety was unity”¹.

This book is my favorite book for many reasons, and I could go on about Humboldt for days (and I intend to, just not now). But I love this book mostly for Wulf’s storytelling of Humboldt’s messy and uncertain journey toward the contributions he made to science and, ultimately, to the future of humanity. And there’s a line she used to describe some of Humboldt’s early progress as a young man that has haunted me since I read it. She wrote,

“Like the tentative pencil lines in a sketch, his new understanding of nature based on scientific observations and feelings was beginning to emerge.²”

It’s a beautiful line, and it captures an experience I have felt as I wander through my own life. Because moving through it has felt, to me, like a sketching, ever trying to blend my knowledge and experience and goals and dreams and desires and emotions together into the picture of my life.

This is where the Olympics comes in (because I know you were wondering).

Like absolutely most people, I’m not part of the .00000122% of the world’s population that gets to compete in an Olympic games. But perhaps unlike a smaller-but-still-vast majority of people, I really, really wanted to.

And I tried. I tried sketching my life toward that picture over the course of several years and tens of thousands of tentative pencil lines (read: volleyball reps). From the time I was little, I envisioned myself as a world-class athlete, an Olympian, and I drove my parents nuts hitting a ball against the exterior wall that happened to line their bedroom—over and over, ad nauseam³. I wrote journal entry after journal entry trying to manifest that shit before I even heard the word “manifest” (one day, I might go on a tangent about how some modern rhetoric surrounding visualization, affirmations, and manifestation actually have their roots in early sports psychology—though their application has… gotten a little weird). And I cried exhilarated tears with every major advancement toward that dream—making my first elite travel team, signing with the University of Utah, winning a conference championship (then another), getting offered a job in Hämeenlinna, Finland.

But then, one day, it was over…

and the sketch was completed, unfinished.

Thus, my heart often feels a deep, ineffable pang when I watch these extraordinary athletes compete—a pang that might be somewhat akin to the Russian feeling of toska, a sick pining or deep ache of the soul. And my not-quite-monkey brain can often turn this pang into a story of how I once I fell short. In which I didn’t finish. In which I failed.

Now, of course, I recognize the absurdity in this—again, only a tiny fragment of humanity can ever join the ranks of the citius, altius, and fortius⁴. But there’s a particular kind of pain that comes with actually having tried for it, with all my might, only to fall short and meet such a complete ending at 23.

Yet it seems to be true that even those lucky enough to count themselves among the Olympians struggle with the same complete ending when their time comes (did you see The Weight of Gold?), usually at a young age. When many spend their 20s building toward an invention of self, the young retired athlete faces the task of reinvention. And while invention and reinvention likely resemble each other quite closely, the difference, for me, has lied in the great sense of loss that comes with the latter.

While Homboldt worked toward an invention of nature, I then sought a reinvention of it.

The years that followed the end of my volleyball career were dark. There was a flailing to them—a grief, and a loss, and a confusion, and a wandering. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of how Wulf described Humboldt’s experience in the aftermath of a massive earthquake on November 4th, 1799:

“As the ground moved beneath him, it destroyed the illusion of a whole life… It was like being woken, suddenly and painfully, from a dream. Until that moment, he had felt an unwavering faith in the stability of nature, but he had been deceived.”⁵

After being so (literally) shaken by that event, Humboldt began to piece together how iterative and interactive the forces of nature are. “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” he wrote. And this interaction, this relationship and activity between the parts, seemed to point him at the unity underlying the variety.

You see, for the longest time, I thought the picture of my life was a portrait of an athlete. And to some extent, we’re built to do just this—life bombards us with a cacophony of directions and decisions and ideas and feelings and people, and it’s up to us to focus them into a cohesive story.

But what life also does really well is erupts underneath us just when we’ve built something that seems substantial. The Buddhists might say that this moment of undoing brings us to a bardo state, a moment of transition between what once was and what will be next. Milarepa referred to this disruption as a great marvel, singing from his cave, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.⁶”

The Olympics are hard for me because they remind me of the breaking of my precious pot. An earthquake eruption. A chapter ended. But as I’ve talked about repeatedly in The Art of Mountain Biking, this particular kind of difficulty has always been a fruitful one because it reminds me of an important truth that creates continuity out of the fragments of my life:

The point of any endeavor or goal lies less in the achievement of it and more in the person I become through the doing of it. No matter which identities I cycle through or which adventures I take, I am here.

It really is as John Muir (who also took great inspiration from Humboldt) said: “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

It still would have been cool to wear a USA jersey, though.

Enjoy the rest of the Olympics, everyone. The US men’s and women’s volleyball teams are providing some excellent television… just saying.

Love,

Danielle

1. Wulf’s words, p. 32

2. p. 61

3. To their credit, my parents have only always expressed a kind of joy and satisfaction that lied beneath their annoyance at the monotonous sound of me hitting the ball against the wall. My sincere thanks, Mom and Dad.

4. The original Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” which is latin for “faster, higher, stronger.” I guess the IOC added “Communiter” (community) to the motto in 2021, worsening (IMO) this hendiatris by breaking its parallelism and turning it into a clunky quadripartite.

5. p. 59

6. From one of my favorite articles, The Four Points of Letting Go in the Bardo