Look: I’d like to think it's fun to be the best. I can’t speak from personal experience because I’ve never been that good at anything...but I can say that I have felt—infrequently—the thrilling, seemingly paradoxical dissociation from self-consciousness, petty anxiety, obsession with my worth in others eyes, self-loathing and despair, that comes with pure immersion in endeavor that I’ve given all of myself to, and find myself immersed in with such raw enthusiastic joy that the “I” I usually find so hideous and weak and basically a hectoring pain in the ass seems like a vanished apparition, and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks—I’m doing it, I’m in that Zone, some kind of ethereal Flow, the heart of the silence, the light, &c.

In these pockets of pure exaltation, nothing’s forced, the game just comes to you, you need less to exert effort than channel it, let it course without impediment through you. And what I find interesting about these bodhi-like severances with all the things that make me unhappy much of the time—weakness, limitations, windows closing, the whole long mediocre crawl toward death—is that their common feature is indifference to outcomes, final tallies, arbitrarily assessed results. Given that the only final score that really matters will manifest as one big zero on the Jumbotron, this slipping-free of end-game anxiety is to me the consummate experience of being alive.

That word—consummate—as nominally inflected in a story I wrote several years back called “The Consummation of Dirk,” was meant to ironize this recalcitrant human propensity to envision some summit of achievement that, once attained, eradicates compulsion to hitch up the pack and scale greater heights—there is no consummation for the living, and though Nowitzki reportedly wept after finally winning his first NBA title last year, I suspect the ecstasy of exorcising years of failure didn’t last as long as he had hoped it would during the arduous ascent to that peak of success: he had either another season to play in the offing, or retirement—and, if the latter, then what?[vii]