A Shot At The Night

1.

I lost.

It was close, and it was a good race, but I lost.  And, looking at the totality of the circumstances (the details of which are boring, especially since they were completely out of my control), I believe I did as well as I could have done.

In the two months or so since the primary, many people have asked me how I am doing.  They are expecting, I think, for me to be traumatized on some level, and so they offer condolences or a pep talk or words of encouragement.  Truthfully, if you had asked me to predict beforehand how I would feel if I had lost, I would have told you that I would be in need of that kind of pick-me-up.

But, I don't.  I didn't feel that way in the immediate moment after I realized I lost, and I don't feel that way now.  I think some folks believe I am putting on a good face, but I can promise you that is not the case.  I'm fine.  

No, that's not right--I'm great.  I stood in front of people and asked them to put their trust in me, and 32,181 of them (almost all of them complete strangers) said yes.  That's wild.  While having another 1500 folks signing on would have made a massive difference in terms of what this next six months, and then probably after that six years, would like like, the deficit doesn't diminish for me the impact of what did happen.  Part of me gets a little giddy merely typing out the number 32,181 and thinking about what that represents.

2.

I was at a small party a while ago at Danielle's place, and she put on some background music.  She's a musician, and so her playlist choices are always on point.  For this evening, she picked a playlist of The Killers.  I like The Killers very much, and always have, and I have always liked the song "Shot at the Night."  But this time, the song really stuck with me.

  

What struck me about this song is the ask.  It doesn't ask for some particular outcome or reward.  It just asks for a, well, "shot in the night."  It's about the chance.  The chance for something magical to happen, the chance to be a part of something.  It's not that outcomes don't matter, but it's not the only thing.  The chance matters, the chance is worth striving for and seeking out and rejoicing in.

I think the reason I'm satisfied is because had a shot at the night.  I would have rather won, to be sure, but there is something wonderful and satisfying about having a chance.  I was there.  I did a crazy thing, and I am glad I did it, because I had a shot and I took it.  It was a moment, and it was "some kinda mysterious," as the song says.  But it is a good mysterious, the kind that is better than the part you can put your hands on, the kind that has a dimension beyond the part you immediate see.

There is a joy in trying, a joy in being a part of something, even if it doesn't work out.  That joy is captured in the song, and that's how I feel.

3.

The ways in which I am a different person now from the person I was when I started this blog mostly has to do with the fact that I have to a large extent let go of the need to win all the time.  From high school until only the last couple of years, I lived my life as if there was some sort of monster chasing me, and the only way to slow it down before it ate me was to throw successes into its maw.  When I think about the successes I had in the past, I am struck by how little joy I felt from them.  Success was about staving off the beast, a temporary, narrow reprieve from a judgment of irrelevance and worthlessness.  I don't say this to brag, but the only reason I wasn't in much worse shape psychologically was that I am actually am pretty talented in a number of areas, and so I had a fairly consistent set of ammunition to feed to the beast.

It really sucks to live that way, but I didn't know any different.  I was told that there is no beast and that no one is keeping score, but you have to believe that.  It has to be a constituent part of who you are.  You cannot fake that.  Believe me, I tried.  And I cannot point to a particular moment or circumstance where things changed.  There was no conversion moment.  It was a slow, years-long grind of imperceptible work that seemed at times to be going nowhere, until the moment when I first realized that I no longer had that death-grip on achieving things.  In early 2021 I tried some projects, they didn't amount to anything, and I just sloughed it off, like water off a duck's back.  I didn't dwell on what didn't work or what I wasn't able to show, but on what might be next, where I wanted to go from there.  Which is how I found myself running for office, taking a flyer on something that probably wasn't going to work, but you never know. And that's how a I feel now.

And the thing is, it's not just about trying stuff and failing.  It's also about trying things and winning, big time.  Last October, I took a chance on Danielle.  On paper, there were lots of reasons to back away, to not push, not to go for it.  I am 100% certain that is what I would have done even a couple of years ago.  But not only did I not back away, it never really occurred to me to back away.  I went for it, and it was the best decision I have ever made.  

I cannot sit here and tell you for sure that I would have sloughed off that one easily had it not worked out.  But the possibility that a failure would not have been an utter disaster would have been unfathomable to the old me.

4.        

At the end of the day, all of this is a miracle.  I am here, and that is a fact that cannot be explained or justified according to any system of science.  I am not necessary to anything, nothing requires that I be around.  And, yet, here I am--alive and aware of my existence.  That is the foundational miracle of miracles, at least as seen from my vantage point.  The more I reflect on this miracle, the more it seems to me that there can be no other response to this improbable reality than gratitude.  For the fact that I exist and am conscious is, truly, gratis--a free gift from God, or the universe, or however one conceives of it (and I would conceive of it as "both"--I have been reading David Bentley Hart recently).  And, of course, your existence is the foundational miracle for you.  We are walking, talking, conscious miracles.  Have you ever stopped and thought about how crazy it is that there are billions of these conscious entities bouncing around this world?

None of which is to say that there aren't bad things in life.  Life is filled with loss and sorrow and pain and horror.  Those are realities, and they need to always be acknowledged.  But I think these realities don't diminish the miracle.  The miracle points to a reality beyond the reality of the pain and the loss.  But, and I think this is more important, the miracle provides a reason to working through and reduce the pain that exists.  It's worth it to try to live that miracle to its maximum, and so it follows to work to reduce the stuff the comes in the way of experiencing the joy that is there at the most basic level.  Because if all there is is sorrow and pain and horror, why bother trying?  Striving only makes sense when there is something to strive toward.  The miracle frames the entire project of being alive as something worthwhile, even where it doesn't seem like in a particular moment.  Or, actually, especially when it doesn't seem like it in a particular moment.

5.

All of this is a rambling, perhaps non-sensical way of announcing that I am going to restart this blog, and start writing again.  As I no longer have a campaign to run, and no immediate prospects of being an elected official any time in the immediate future, I feel more free to do that, and I want to do that.  

The project I have in mind, at least to start, is a 2.0 version of this series of posts.  The idea there was to try to set forth some account of how I understand Christianity, channeled through the framework of the Apostles' Creed.  This time, I'm not going to use the Creeds as a framing device, but instead try to start with how I would suggest someone who knows nothing about Christianity or religion to begin to approach the question.  I might get to other topics, but that's what I am going to try to work on.