Category: Soccer

Today & today & today

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Today is slipping by. I am mapping writing adventures. I am arranging practice schedules and shirt orders for a soccer team. I am hungry. I haven’t eaten lunch. I haven’t left this office for hours. I’ve written nothing but emails, messages, reminders.

My Writing Adventure is completely full, with interest expressed in future Adventures, should I attempt this again.

I’ve been invited to France — to France! — this spring, to promote the translation of my novel there (details have not been confirmed, nor is this a sure thing, but the possibility exists). In the meantime, I have signed up for several mandatory soccer coaching courses. I have a public appearance this coming Tuesday at the Kitchener Public Library (“An evening with Carrie Snyder“), and other events booked elsewhere in February and March, April, May. We are planning a daunting family holiday. I want to go cross-country skiing with my daughter while there’s snow on the ground. My muscles ache from early morning workouts.

Yesterday, I read this article on my phone while waiting to pick up my daughter from a yoga class. It’s a light-hearted how-to article countering all of the inevitable new-year-new-me-resolution articles of this season: “How to be a moderately successful person.” And I sat in the car and wondered: Could I aspire to be this person? For serious? Something about the less-ness of it twanged a genuine longing in me.

I’m not complaining!! But wow. On some days, like today, like every day this week, I am overwhelmed by the ways in which I manage to fill up my life, the variety of activities and challenges I willingly, happily, excitedly sign myself up for. It occurs to me that I may be hiding from something — from the quiet and stillness of empty space and time. Am I hiding from the possibilities that exist in doing less, caring less, aspiring to less? Or am I, in fact, doing less by doing more, my attention too scattered to finish whatever book will be my next? Is all of this an elaborate distraction? It’s possible. But I love doing so much of it. I love being on the field with the kids. I love writing with other people, together. I love spending time with my kids in different contexts. I love the adventure of travel. I’ll admit freely that I fear inertia. I’ve been stuck before, I’ve been restless and lonely and bored.

Truly, I am not that, right now.

I’m looking forward to sharing my word of the year with you, as soon as I’ve had a chance to share it first with my WOTY friends. I think my new word relates to all of this, this swirl of activity and these swirling thoughts. Next post, maybe.

xo, Carrie

Friday morning to do

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Holidays. We’re screaming toward them at breakneck speed and despite there being no snow yet this December, Christmas is coming. Christmas will come. I’ve ordered a turkey.

Accomplishments in recent days include: remembering to order a turkey; not forgetting to go to CJ’s open house at school; not forgetting to pick up AppleApple from yoga; and sorting through our mail pile (overflowing the ample basket in which we toss everything), and my kitchen pile (papers that are too important to recycle, but not important enough to tend to or file immediately). I also created a brand new file folder into which I put random professional items that need attention…eventually). I’m calling this my “Friday morning to do” folder.

It’s Friday morning. I didn’t do any of what’s in there.

Just saying. But at least I got the damn piles sorted.

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I also finished marking and submitted my grades. Bittersweet, but there it is. Done with teaching, for now.

I’ve already found a replacement for my teaching energies (unpaid, however; if it’s unpaid, I will excel at it). A week ago, I was given the head coach job of my daughter’s U11 rep soccer “development” team (they don’t call it a “C” or “B” team, but that’s what it is). It’s her first time playing rep soccer, and it’s my first time coaching on the rep side. And I’m going to need a special folder to keep that part of life organized. Or a time slot. How to partition off the various sections of my life, so I can stay focused on whatever I’m focused on? I’d like to complete a few things, in addition to rolling along in the usual way, immersed in all tasks that have no end.

More meditation? Problem with meditation right now is that I drift off; meditation becomes nap time. Not kidding.

I’ve also been helping, to a small degree, to find and prepare housing for the refugee family our neighbourhood association has sponsored. But this morning, I’m not at the new apartment with some of the others from our group, who are cleaning and sorting and sewing; this morning, I’m cleaning and sorting at home, and then I’m going to spend a few hours with friends before racing off to complete a rather daunting list that must be done before our first Christmas begins: around 3PM this afternoon, with the arrival of Kevin’s family.

Why am I blogging?

Because in all of this remembering to do things, and creating lists, and flurry of emails and information and errands and doing and hopping out of bed and going to bed too late, I haven’t been chronicling. Maybe that’s okay; I don’t need to press publish on every last thing that happens. But I do need to write. I need to write.

xo, Carrie

A little peace

IMG_20151209_105425.jpg Today, I want to write about the little things. Little things that might seem unimportant because they’re not on any to-do list, they’re not responsibilities. Little things that might seem incidental in a bigger picture, not the heart of any day, but the flavour. Little things that give me a little peace. I’m knee-deep in marking and have to stay on schedule, so this is not what I should be doing, but I’m going to make a list of “little things” to mark this particular moment in time. At other moments, I might put other things on this list. But today, now, here is what’s given me a little peace recently.

Playing the piano. Either my own improvised noodling around, or sight-reading cheesy Christmas songs, or accompanying my ten-year-old during her violin practice.

Crafting. I know, weird, right? Not my usual thing. But I’ve gotten into a latch-hooking project, initiated by my ten-year-old (who loves her crafts). Same child also initiated an ornament-making craft-time this weekend, and everyone in the family got involved. My personal fave are the Trudeau ornaments, crafted by my thirteen-year-old (who has a new haircut, very stylish, if I do say so myself; I gave both my teenagers haircuts recently, which is another kind of craft, in a way, I suppose).

Walking the dogs. I’m running very little right now due to injury, but I’ve found surprising peace in walking the dogs before bedtime, or on an early weekend morning when the neighbourhood is quiet. The pace is gentle. The dogs amuse me.

Swimming. To replace the running. Monday was my first day, and I went with my swim coach, who also happens to by my thirteen-year-old daughter. She should be your swim coach too. Our session was as tough as a boot camp. She’s demanding, encouraging and kind, and smart about correcting technical flaws in my stroke. (She also coaches Kevin and her younger sister on Thursday mornings. So this is a little thing many of us in the family are enjoying right now.)

Coaching. Right now, I’m coaching my fourteen-year-old’s indoor futsal team (similar to soccer), and I’m volunteering with my ten-year-old’s soccer team, too. I love working with both groups of kids — the teenaged boys and the younger girls. I’ve been practicing my deeper coach’s voice around the house, and every practice or game is another opportunity to learn something new, or put some new concept into practice (for me, and for them). It’s the perfect activity for a person with a growth mindset outlook. We can always get better! Hurray!

Writing. I haven’t had a lot of writing time, recently, so I’ve been taking my laptop to basketball and soccer practices at which I’m not involved. Earplugs in. Sweet vanishing into another world.

Stretching. My body needs to stretch, loves to stretch. I’ve been squeezing in a few yoga classes.

Reading. A couple of days ago, I thought I had a few free minutes. Ever have those moments? When you think, how strangely wonderful that I should have nothing to do? So I sat in front of the fire devouring Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name. I was so relaxed, so blissful — so blissfully forgetting that in fact I did have something to do. This strangely wonderful moment had been brought to me by a memory lapse. I’d forgotten to pick up my youngest at school; friends had to help out; and I felt embarrassed and somewhat shamed for my parenting lack as I jogged along the sidewalk, late, late, late. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wish for more of those rare “free” minutes for daytime reading.

All for now. Please comment if you have “little things” that give you a little peace, too.

xo, Carrie

Discernment

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Discernment is something Mennonites are expert at; in fact, Mennonites are so good at discernment that it sometimes seems it’s code for clearly we don’t all agree so let’s keep discerning in perpetuity so as to never make a decision. Given that this is my cultural background, perhaps it makes sense that I enjoy process so much. But I do also like to come around to decisions now and again. That said, discernment is rather brilliant, in my opinion. What it does is allow a decision to unfold slowly, with voice given to many different opinions and angles; it’s a process of listening as much as speaking.

This post is a continuation of my thoughts from yesterday’s confession: that I don’t like being the speaker at the front of the room.

I’ve been trying to discern why.

It isn’t that I don’t like being in a leadership position. In fact, I enjoy taking the lead, to which my younger siblings could attest. But there are different styles and types of leadership, and the leadership I prefer to practice is the kind that asks questions, that operates in relationship, that collaborates with, that is creative and responsive and in the moment. I want to ask questions. I want to hear stories, I want to hear and try to understand other perspectives. I want to see my small ideas opening up small ideas in someone else, and I want to be opened up too; I want to learn too.

It’s the reason I like reading and writing short stories, the kind that end in a questioning, open way that unfolds into the reader and the reader’s experience, rather than telling the reader what the answer is. Resonance. That’s what I’m looking for, in everything I do.

Yesterday evening, off I went with my eldest son to coach his soccer team. I was as tired as I’d been all day. There wasn’t time to eat supper. But when we got onto the field, the hour flew by, my exhaustion vanished. I love coaching soccer. I don’t love it because I’m an expert. I’m not. I love it because it’s a creative undertaking, and because I find myself, in this role, engaged with the kids on the team: trying to figure out what will motivate them as individuals, assessing their levels of interest and skill, and asking them to push themselves in small ways—for each player this will be different. I also love it because it’s fun. We’re meeting up so they can play a game.

I think we all need to play. We should all be doing something every day that feels playful, just for fun, something that lifts us out of the ordinary. Something we don’t have to do for any reason other than it makes us happy.

When teaching is going well, it’s for the same reasons. It’s because we’re engaged in a creative enterprise together. Writing and revision should feel playful. I know this won’t always be the case, and writing is work, no doubt about it, but for me—and what I want to share—is that writing, especially fiction, is play. You get to live inside your imagination like you haven’t had permission to do since you were a child. You get to explore whatever interests you. You get to ask questions and wonder and roam freely around your own mind, making it all up, drawing from the back of your mind “perishable moments you hadn’t even noticed that you noticed.” To paraphrase Lynda Barry.

And that’s about where I’ve gotten in my process of discernment. Expect me to release a mission statement in the next decade or so.

xo, Carrie

P.S. Read this, from the New Yorker (wish I had a subscription!): an inspiring and moving essay by George Saunders about his own creative writing teachers. (Side note: how the heck did Tobias Wolff have time to help parent three children, work full-time leading graduate classes in creative writing, thoroughly read every submission to the program, and write and publish his own books?)

P.S. 2 Here’s how I started this morning. I slept in until 6:45. Then I listened to this song and did kundalini exercises for about half an hour, while the older kids started their day too, but before the younger two got up. It was a good start and I feel much more rested. First discernment decision: I’m limiting my 5AM exercise to no more than three times per week; I’m open to dropping to even less if I’m still really tired. I will reassess in six weeks.

We do not want merely

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“We do not want merely to see beauty … we want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see.” – C.S. Lewis (as discovered on Twitter; follow @CSLewisDaily for more quotes)

Today marks the second week of summer holidays. I’ve put over a thousand kilometres onto the little car since Thursday morning. I’ve been across the border, stuck in traffic jams, meandering back roads, standing by soccer fields, hauling various bags, buying food that will keep in the heat, making and executing miniature step-by-step plans to get one kid safely to the places she needs to be at the right times. She is now safely at overnight camp with her sister. I am safely at home, in my office. But I couldn’t keep her entirely safe. Her team made the final at the tournament, but she was injured in their third game in a bad fall. This is parenting one doesn’t want to have to do: watching from the far side of the field as a medic checks out your kid, then, after the game, helping your kid understand and accept that she likely won’t be able to play for the rest of the tournament. We need to think long-term, the parent says, and the kid says, I really want to play! Maybe if I rest it overnight and ice it and … Yes, maybe, but, says the parent, taking the long view, knowing that injuries will happen in contact sport and a week or two of rest will pass in a flash, while an injury worsened by poor management could dog a player for weeks, months, more …

So she cheered her teammates from the bench in their fourth game on Saturday afternoon. She woke yesterday morning optimistic, and dressed for the match. Her coach let her play a few minutes in the final game, but she ran like she was stiff and in pain, so he decided, wisely, not to put her back on again. I was relieved. She understood. The long-view won the day.

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Here’s part of what I wrote on Saturday morning, waiting for that third game to begin, the one in which she was injured, when I didn’t know she would be; I hadn’t read the C.S. Lewis quote, above, yet, either. But I think I was choosing to write for the very reason Lewis pinpoints: to be united with the beauty we see (if we go looking for it).

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In Ohio. I sit in a collapsible chair behind my car in the shade on a warm morning, the fourth of July. It’s Independence Day in the United States, and I seem to be in a quintessentially American scene: wide blue sky, gravel parking lot, trucks and cars lined up, not neatly but askew, claiming space, because there is so much space, and just beyond the short grassy hill, a highway off-ramp. Noisy, constant noise of engines turning as they veer past on the other side of the guardrail. In the gravel lot, dust balloons when a car zooms by looking for a parking spot. I’ve returned to the same spot where we parked yesterday, just under a clump of bushes with pale green leaves flecked with tiny white spots that look like a fungus, an invasive disease, not native to the plant’s patterns. The breeze moves the speckled leaves. Wildflowers have pushed through the gravel near my feet, like flowers that belong in a desert, sparse pale purple blooms with spiked centres.

A man sits in a convertible opposite me, and talks on his cellphone, shaded under a ball cap. I choose not to look too often in his direction, although we must both see each other. Parked to his left is a junked-out abandoned trailer home with the brand-name Tag-A-Long on its faded front above a vented window, which has blue sheet insulation propped against it from the inside. The trailer’s hitch is rusted red and green, deep dirty brown-red, metallic green, a beautiful shade of green richer than emeralds, but what does it mean, to beautifully mark an abandoned object? What does it mean to flower in a parking lot? What does it mean to sit by a highway and write about the gravel scattered underfoot, embedded loosely into the clay-like dirt, pale ochre dirt, pale grey and white stones, some so small they are almost granular, worn down to sand?

“I’m gonna go now,” says the man in the convertible, on his phone, but he doesn’t. This is the way of conversations. You state that you are finished, but you don’t unstick yourself, not quite yet. You laugh. “You didn’t say that,” you say, and chuckle. A large 4 x 4 Ford pickup kicks up dust between us. The rumble from the cars on the off-ramp obscure what might be said, if I were closer and could overhear this half of a conversation.

I see a Canadian flag flapping on a truck down at the end of the lot, near field 14 where my daughter’s team will play their second game today. Beyond that, taller than the trees, are signs advertising gas stations and fast food restaurants. The street lights above the off-ramp look like objects from outer space, as you might imagine an alien spaceship to look, with lights suspended inside bright shiny metal pods like six vast aluminum mixing bowls, upside-down, and affixed around a slender pole, way up high, like cake tins stabbed onto pointy spikes high up in the sky.

What happens when you sit and write? You see differently, you fall down inside of yourself and go quiet and you receive whatever passes by, whatever dust and stray information and overheard conversation passes by, you reach up into the air and pluck it like fruit, ripe or unripe, doesn’t matter, you’re hungry for information.

::

It’s true. I was hungry. And in a gravel parking lot beside an on-ramp, I found some measure of satiation.

May you be united with the beauty you see.

xo, Carrie

News from obscurity

IMG_20150529_173342.jpgA few things have happened around here and my reporting is not keeping pace.

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The whole family went to Hamilton on Friday evening to cheer on the Canadian national women’s soccer team in a friendly against England, the last game they’ll play before the World Cup matches start next week. And Canada won! Fascinating to dissect the strategy on the field, and watch the play get more intense as the game went on (I sat beside my brother Christian, who had scored us the tickets, and it reminded me of watching baseball or hockey with him as kids, analyzing every play).

My kids will never quite appreciate (thankfully) the thrill that I got from attending a sports match in a packed stadium involving two women’s teams who were in no way being objectified: in their eyes, they were simply watching talented athletes battling it out. When I was a soccer-playing kid, there was no national women’s team that I knew of; if there was a team, I didn’t know the names of anyone on it; and women’s soccer teams did not compete internationally in the Olympics or World Cup. When CJ pored over the program the next day, asking for the pronunciation of names of his favourite players, whose numbers and positions he knew (Kadeisha Buchanan, for example), saying, “She was a really good defender,” honestly, my heart sang. He doesn’t know it, but by seeing those women as really good athletes, he’s seeing them as fully realized human beings of equal worth and value to male athletes; and he isn’t even doing a comparison between the sexes, he’s just cheering for his team.

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On Saturday we had a little party for The Candy Conspiracy. It poured rain, so we were very glad to be indoors at the Waterloo Public Library. As a finale, I broke out a uke and played the Juicy Jelly Worm song. It’s a different crowd, that’s for sure, from the usual literary reading. It felt much more interactive, which I enjoyed.

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Fooey with Sophie Schmidt*, who scored the winning goal. *cardboard cutout version

Fooey’s soccer team had another fun and winning game last night, coached by me and my friend Marnie; this coaching gig is turning out to be even more fun than I’d anticipated. It helps to have such an enthusiastic, friendly, coachable group of girls. I might get hooked on the job.

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Lap three, 1500m. She’s the small one in blue trying to pass the taller one in yellow.

And today, I got to watch my girl runner tough it out in the 1500m and 800m distances at the regional track meet: she won the 1500m in a very competitive time, and came second in a hard-fought 800m, on rather tired legs. This means she will go on to compete again on Thursday in the regional final. It’s both a joy and privilege to get to watch her take her fierce self out into the fray and lay everything on the line. I honestly thought that watching her win that 1500m was the MOST EXCITING MOMENT in my whole life. Maybe I’m exaggerating. But in the moment, that’s how it felt. It was so surprising, so unexpected. I may have hugged a few strangers.

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There are other exciting (and less exciting) moments that I could report upon here, but I’m out of time. Another evening is upon us, another early supper (chicken, rice, dipping sauce, maybe broccoli if I get back to the kitchen in time), many more soccer games, a bit of coaching, and lots of transportation of people hither and yon. Wish me … well, strength and calm.

xo, Carrie