Another thing I wrote some weeks ago but finally have a place for. 

Opening Day, thank God, is on the horizon. Last Sunday, while en route somewhere in the car, I popped an exhibition game on the radio and listened to an inning or two of relaxed banter interspersed with game narrative: spring training for the ear.

Each new sports season promises a new beginning, a message sent most profoundly with baseball because the season launches in spring, when nature is reborn, and ends after the harvest, when the world starts to turn chilly again. Baseball resonates more deeply because it echoes the rhythms of the world.

This sense of new possibility that each season offers might seem, at first look, a cruel joke on humanity. After all, in real life we don’t get to start fresh. We start each year with the baggage of the year before. (Even if you enact your New Year’s resolutions, they are reactions to the past.) We cannot escape from the wrong turns, dead-ends, or breakdowns we lived through. While sports seasons promise each team a new opportunity for triumph—or at least a chance to rebuild and lay a solid foundation for the future—real life is much more likely to feel like living in a rut.  

Sports seasons suggest Osiris. Real life makes us feel like Sisyphus. 

But, of course, both opposites are also true.  A new sports seasons is not truly a new beginning. Each team carries with it the burdens of last year’s mistakes or blown games (ask the Mets), and fans’ hopes about the new season are shadowed by nagging concerns: this player’s season-ending injury the year before, that pitcher’s loss of a couple of miles an hour off his fastball, that slugger’s wobbly confidence after a shaky season. Plus there are questions about off-season personnel decisions—did the added free agent bring not only the ability to hit in the fifth spot but also a personality that will mesh with the rest of the clubhouse? Will losing a free agent, or trading away a veteran, weaken team chemistry, proving—too late—that his value to the team was more than his performance in the field? Sports seasons, just like life, do not offer clean breaks from the past, but a continuity with the past, in which the wounds caused by last year’s failures and questions about this year’s patches have profound impact on the new season. You can’t know how your team of 25 will work together, or what further tinkering it might need, until it actually confronts the challenges of the marathon. 

Still, each team does begin with a clean slate. Every team starts 0-0, last year’s champion no better than last year’s doormat. We think this is in contrast to life, where—once we leave school—there are no regularly recurring new seasons where we each start fresh. But if we think that, we’re missing an important truth. We can choose to make any day a new beginning. Feeling unwell, we can learn to live more healthfully. Profligate in spending, we can start to save. Lost and alone, we can reach out.  

No, it isn’t always easy. We’ll carry emotional baggage—like the ballplayer’s loss of confidence— that makes it difficult to muddle through. We must learn to face, over time, diminished skills—but, just as the veteran pitcher gains in guile what he loses off his fastball, we might pick up some wisdom we can use to get out of a jam. We still carry the burden of responsibilities, like the expectations that weigh down the high-priced free agent or the can’t-miss prospect, but those responsibilities don’t have to immobilize us. 

We don’t have to continue pushing that stupid rock up the hill. We can figure out a new way to move it. What about the Tom Sawyer approach? What about chaining it down when we get it up there? How about leveling the damn hill? If nothing else, we can walk away from that annoying rock—or turn it into a rock garden. 

And in life we’re better off than those ballplayers anyway. They have to wait for the calendar pages to turn, but we don’t. It’s not the schedule-maker, it’s us, that wipes the slate clean and starts a new life. We can launch a new season any time we want to.