GirlMeetsArt

Before he died, maybe 6 months ago, my Dad suggested that maybe it was time for me to give up playing basketball. After all, he noted, I’m in my 50s and I have chronic back pain. I play with a brace on my left knee, because I blew out my ACL four years ago and couldn’t pay for the surgery to reconstruct it.

I announced to him that I’d stop playing when I couldn’t walk. (An aside: my Dad worked for 30 years in a hellishly hot steelmaking plant, and he never was sick—in fact, he never had a headache! When he retired, he got a stomach virus for the first time in his life, and bemoaned to my Mom that now that he was retired, he was going to die!

Well, he made it another 30 years or so. But I recalled our conversation about my quitting basketball after reading Chris Ballard’s Point After in SI, about his 71-year-old Dad continuing to play pick-up games against men half his age, despite two knee replacements and a bad shoulder.

As Ballard notes, “But giving up a game isn’t merely giving up a game.” Exactly.

For me, playing pick-up games against other women is my mental health outlet and a creative outlet, too, when I think about it. Over the past 10 years, my game has gotten better, as I have challenged myself to improve my passing and dribbling skills.

I take true joy in making the perfect pass down the court, a pass that takes imagination to see and creativity to try, and seeing it reach a teammate right in stride for an easy score.

A new book came out this month, Women Of Design: Influence and Inspiration From the Original Trailblazers to the New Groundbreakers. I’m not in it. A friend of mine saw my stuff on this blog and said, oh, you should sell your stuff on Etsy. So I went to Etsy and saw literally hundreds of awe- and envy-inspiring pieces, and thought, I can’t compete with this. So, boy, what a way to depress myself right around the holidays. In today’s instant-connection world, it’s far easier to set the world’s best as your own measure. After all, you can easily view thousands of wonderful crafts, paintings, websites, logos, prints, etc. etc. in an hour’s time and even more easily find yourself lacking. At least before the web, if you avoided bookstores and magazine subscriptions, you could more easily fight off that internal critic. (more…)