This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Never enough. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
On my soccer team (it was just the one) there was a girl whose face I can still see, wearing a look of determination. My own energy was the opposite; I could not then and can’t now imagine having any interest in outmaneuvering a bunch of other people to reach an object, gain control of it, and (especially) direct it accurately at a distant target. Unsubscribe.
This girl, though—she had the same icy, focal stare my cat does when I get out the treats, or that I do whenever Julianna Margulies orders a gin martini on “The Good Wife.” It had a kind of predatorial purity, like millions of years of evolution had finally converged in a goal against the opposing five-year-olds in Laird Park.
I’ve been thinking about this after my longest yet pre-marathon training run the other day, 20 miles starting at home in Brooklyn and ending with two loops in Central Park and a quick sprint down Fifth Avenue to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Throughout the second loop I’d been flirting with thoughts of a third, which would put me at marathon distance—and why not? It’s an arbitrary number, an incremental addition of wear and tear over what I’d done already. I decided against it because the wet (long story) Band-Aid I’d applied to my chafing left heel was hanging on only in an act of mystical charity, and also I didn’t want to compromise my other training this week. But it’s a long journey that’s led to the point where a choice about running a marathon or not could be made on the fly.
And therein lie a couple of different stories of determination. There’s the kind I saw on my teammate’s face when we were kindergarteners: to all appearances inborn, instinctive, and unambivalent. And there’s the kind that starts diffuse, even undefined, and gains clarity and concentration over time—a process that determines us.
The word itself, determination, has not so much a precise definition as domain over a whole region of meaning. It describes an assertive exercise of resolution or definition—of deciding what something is and is not. But it can also be receptive, an act of apprehending or fact-finding. And two of its definitions, per m-w.com, lodge in the will but present differing degrees of force. By these two readings, determination is either ”firm or fixed intention to achieve a desired end” or, more softly, ”direction or tendency to a certain end.” These interweave. What today is only a tendency might tomorrow be a firm intention, animated by the advent of desire.
Determination made manifest over time is a measurement, a diagnosis, in which we learn rather than state who we are—“a fixing or finding of the position, magnitude, value, or character of something.” It’s a revelation. Thus an editor who didn’t go outside much turns into a writer gearing up for an Ironman—not from setting out that way, but because one thing led to another.
If you enjoy Western Coffee, please make a donation on my fundraising page for the nonprofit Achilles International, which is how I’m gaining entry to the New York City Marathon this year—my first. All donations go to the nonprofit and its work with disabled athletes; I’m paying my own race fees, etc.