a thing worth having
“Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”
–“Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn (covered here by BNL)
I was playing Spelunky yesterday. It was going great. I was on 3-4. I had a cape, the climbing gloves, a ton of bombs, and the hedjet. Everything seemed to be coming together for a hell run. Visions of fortune and glory were already starting to fill my head, a lust for virtual riches filling my heart. Then, as I was slowly descending toward the exit, a mammoth blasted me with its icy breath, causing me to plummet helplessly to my doom. It all ended in an instant. I was heartbroken. It was a small heartbreak.
There’s a way in which San Francisco comes alive when the Giants are in the playoffs or the World Series. Crowds stand clustered outside of bars where the games are on. Cheers echo down streets when runs are scored. If the Giants don’t win the World Series, fans will be heartbroken. It will be a bigger heartbreak.
And the heartbreak of Spelunky and the heartbreak of baseball are essential to what those things are. If we didn’t have our hearts open to being broken by them in ways big and small, we wouldn’t find joy in the moments of triumph.
Recently Julia tweeted this:

…which got me thinking about what Jonathan Richman was like when I would hear him sing that song live 17 or 18 years ago–he was kinda like this:
Goofy and happy and a little sad and wonderful. And how I saw him live a few months ago, three nights in a row, and how he did two very different versions of this song on two of those three nights, and how it seems so much richer now than it did then, so much wiser and truer and deeper. Kinda like this, but not exactly.
And I wondered how some artists, like Jonathan, stay so vital and vibrant as they age while others get soft and lose whatever fire was in them, and I think it must be a willingness to have your heart broken. It must be staying alive to the risk of love.
I got an email the other day letting me know that I’d gotten a new message on OKCupid. So I logged on to the site for the first time in weeks and was notified that, since my last visit, 26 people had “liked” me. 26! What does that even mean? To me, as someone who, over the course of my entire life, has encountered only a small handful of people I could even see the possibility of anything serious with, that number sounds crazy. OKCupid seems to say there will always be another profile to click on, someone who might be a better match for you than whoever you’re with now, so why risk anything? And I think that so many people are internalizing this idea, not from OKCupid specifically, of course, but in general, from so many places–reserving feelings, holding back, always thinking that maybe someone or something better will come along. Guarding against heartbreak. Not risking.
But I want that risk. I want us to take a chance together on a we that comes ahead of you or I, a we that is something greater, something we pour ourselves into that can remake us as something different and better together than we could be on our own.
I love how, in this wonderful conversation between bell hooks and Cornel West, West says at one point,
“Love is a form of death, and market culture is a death-denying culture. But love is a form of death. You’ll never be able to get on the edge of that abyss to make the leap to know what love is unless you’re willing to take that risk, be it personally with your isolated, lonely self who’s killed in order for a new self to emerge and tangle with another self…or love of wisdom where you undergo a fundamental transformation, your prejudices and presuppositions are called into question. That’s a form of death, to be reborn, to become more mature in your critical orientation.”
And later, he says, “So much of the world is wrestling with frustrated and neglected love. So every attempt of expression of love, even if it doesn’t work, is still worth it. In my dialogues I have with the brothers in the prison, often times when they reflect back on their lives, the things they remember were the moments when the love tried to flow and they cut it off."
Which made me think of how Erica Jong said, “Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
I am a thing worth having. There’s risk involved. I don’t want to come without a fight. Or a price.





















-Out of Africa
Notes
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