Love Letters in Winks & Baseball Fields
I was watching Field of Dreams with my family the other night, a movie we so often play when visitors come to stay. There’s something so nostalgic, so calming, so much richer about movies from the 90’s. A 20-something Tom Hanks playing an extinct arcade game and creating the unrealistic ideals of men that would shape my standards for decades to come, a dressed in drag Robin Williams, Nancy Meyers enchanting us with the at-home wedding reception and father-daughter friendship that still lives in my mind today. The echo of a more simple life, one we can romanticize, and often long for.
Lately, I’ve been telling my friends that the deep soul whispering desire to create something in this world before I die has become impossible to ignore. I think this is a thing that happens in your 30s. It keeps me up at night, equal doses inspiration and paralysis. Not a far cry from what we see Ray (Kevin Costner) experience in his Iowa cornfield, one late summer evening. The slight, ever-present shadow of a voice whispering to him, “if you build it, he will come.”
I’ve had my own whispers for years now. The daughter of high achieving, Ivy -educated parents who had most likely sacrificed their own creative aspirations to secure stability and opportunity as modeled by their own parents. I took the straight and narrow path, following in their footsteps. And hey, this is not to say they would not have supported me fully had I really had the courage to say “this is what I want to do”, but expansion, seeing to believe, is everything. It’s difficult to believe there is another way, if you haven’t seen it’s possible before.
To my family’s shock and horror, one summer day last year as I was sitting in yet another leadership meeting at the Manhattan based beauty company I had been working with for two years, I realized I just couldn’t do it anymore. A decade in corporate America had left me jaded, tired, and I’d had enough. It was a feeling so overwhelming I couldn’t get the thought out of my head “there has to be more than this”.
On the heels of an 8-week sabbatical in 2022, (because we all figure out what we want to do with our lives in 8 weeks, right?) this had been a long time coming. One year coming to be exact. I’d spent the last 12 months at the company after my break coasting, knowing I wanted to make a change but didn’t know what it looked like yet. Knowing that my devotion to creating a life of alignment was going to take more than a couple of months away from the life I had been so programmed to believe I wanted for decades before. And a year almost to the day of my return after that sabbatical, I quit. I quit without a plan. I had nothing lined up, I only had my own sense of knowing and a list in my journal of how I wanted to feel each day. At work, in my home, in my soul.
So back to Ray. Similarly, he builds it. He mows down his prized crop, outlines the diamond shaped field, sets up the bleachers for a crowd that hasn’t come yet. Just as Ray thinks his journey might lead to a dead end, that he really might have built a baseball field over his only source of livelihood, a small recompense just nightly visits from the ghost of a baseball player who died in 1951 (who is super cute by the way, hello 20-something Ray Liotta), he hears it again. A little nudge, a little whisper, to keep going. That there’s something more to discover. But towards what? He doesn’t know.
All the while, Ray has his family in his ear as we so often do, telling him to make the safer choice. Sell the farm, give up the baseball field, give up the whispers, do what’s logical and what must be the only sane choice. Sound familiar?
One night, during a quest to Boston to find yet another clue, another pebble that just might lend his creative outburst that summer night to absolution, he meets Archie “Moonlight” Graham. Tall, distinguished, white hair, he’s a physician who got his shot to play in the major leagues for the New York Giants in 1922 but never made it to bat. Only, the year is 1989, and Graham passed away in 1972, so Graham is looking pretty handsome to be a ghost. Ray and Graham end up back at his old office and he asks Graham, if he could have one wish, one thing he could still do in his life, what would it be? Graham pauses, then looks at him slyly and says he would be back at Giants stadium. He wants to stand on the batter’s mound on a hot summer day with skies too blue to open his eyes clearly. He wants to stare down the pitcher across from him and give him a wink, while he throws one low and away.
Graham wasn’t remembered for his time as a ballplayer, albeit only one inning as one. He was remembered for the wonderful man that he was. The physician, the mentor, the friend. While only in a whole life’s worth of retrospect can he look back and say - “it would have been this”, it’s because he tried. He tried something different.
Maybe that thing we try doesn’t have to be what defines us in our lifetime, it doesn’t have to be the thing made for others to enjoy, it doesn’t have to be the thing we build our life around, it can just be something we tried. Something we did that one time. Something we did for ourselves.
And whether we’re like Graham with a clearly defined idea of what that thing would be if we could go back in time, or perhaps more like Ray, who at the end of his life wouldn’t know what that thing would be, he would only know he would have listened to those whispers. The point is, I want to build my field for the ghosts of dead baseball players with no idea why I’m doing it. I want to stand on the batter’s mound on a hot summer day with skies too blue to open my eyes clearly. I want to stare down the pitcher across from me and give him a wink, while he throws one, low and away.
