““Something can be moving in one direction, smoothly, swiftly, something like a ball, or, oh, say, A LIFE, and then a bat swings, at the perfect moment, swings true, and hits that something, and it constricts...And its energy is reversed, and it fires off in the opposite direction, completely the other way to what has been, to what seems meant to be...But here's the lesson: The ball—the life, whatever—is STILL THERE. The energy hasn't destroyed it, the impact, the explosion, hasn't erased it from the world. It still exists, it's just in a different place altogether. A place it didn't expect to end up in...All the time, when I batted, I felt like it was meditation, like it was control. Like, swinging the bat at the perfect time, before you even see the ball—like that was a metaphor for something, for some kind of Zen peacefulness. What I didn't realize was: I got the metaphor wrong. I was not the bat. I was the ball. THAT—that is the lesson of the batting cage.””
