Poetry Balances Me Out With The Other Roles I Play In This Life

It Is A Bin That Holds My Baggage

Poetry changed my life.

It expanded my mind, it allowed me to vent heavy emotions, and it offered me balance when I was feeling depressed or anxious.

I remember 10 hour bus rides in the minor leagues and while most of my teammates glued their eyes to their phones or to a Netflix show, I would write poems.

I did this consistently for three years before I decided to hang the spikes up, but when I retired from baseball, my poetry wasn’t finished. Instead, it evolved, it changed, I was a different person and my words, stanzas, and imagery became different too.

In the last four years since my retirement, I ebb and flow with my self-proclaimed poetry career.

There are times I’ll find myself in an Elon Musk work ethic mode where I am creating poems left and right for a week straight. Then two months later, poetry will become a craft from a time when I used to dream, as my creativity lies dormant waiting for the next ascension.

I recently have gotten back into writing poetry and it feels amazing. With every poem I write, I am quickly reminded of the balance it once gave me throughout the grind of a professional baseball season. Except this time, it is giving me balance throughout the grind of a busy coaching season.

Winters in the Midwest is where baseball players have to get creative. This is where the warehouses come into play, with a makeshift batting cage put up in the corner and an L Screen for someone to stand behind while they pitch to the other player.

You can find a batting cage in the most random of places. Heck, you’ll be in an 80,000 sq. ft warehouse for a ginormous corporation and find a batting cage tucked away in the back corner filled with lights, tees, and bucket of balls.

It is pretty artistic to say the least.

I coach kids from 9 years old to 17 years old. When I put on the coaching hat, I enter firm mode. I am the coach who can’t be budged, the Denzel Washington from Remember the Titans, or the Samuel L. Jackson in Coach Carter.

The kids and adolescent males need someone to hold them accountable. They need someone who is going to discipline them; a rock that is going to hold the whole team accountable.

They need a leader.

I do my best to be this “immovable rock” for these groups of young men. Often times I’ll crack and find myself laughing at the naivety of these young men along with their innocence, but most of the time I’m spot on and stand firm in the role.

Even though I enjoy playing this role and I am good at playing this role, it doesn’t always encapsulate my total being, since I am naturally a sensitive person who is in touch with his gentler side.

So by the end of an eight hour coaching day, I crave a little balance. I gravitate to something lighter, something to help me take a load off.

This is where the pen and the paper come into play. My coaching schedule in November has been filled with 30–40 hour weeks of playing the perfect coach. I have been dedicating much of my free time to creating poems and it has been extravagant, a true breathe of fresh air.

Before I plop my tush on my foldout chair and drop my elbows on my foldout table, both of which I purchased from Home Depot; I am an uneven balance beam slowly tilting from left to right. Meditating on writing a poem is like taking a shovel and digging deep into the pieces of my mind that crave to be felt. The more I dig, the more I feel the uneven balance beam begin to level out.

Two sentences, done. Eight sentences with every line containing 10 syllables and every other line ending in a rhyme, done. A title and an ending, done. I evolve into a mechanic in the workshop welding words, lines, and paragraphs together.

Not only am I a mechanic but I am an herbalist too, curing the unstimulated parts of my brain. The poems are my herbs, the bliss is the cure.

The finish product is a slice of genuineness, delivering validation and wholeness to the empty parts of my mind that need it most.

The combination between playing the firm coach and the philosophical creative poet is almost perfect. I can always use poetry to help balance me out. Even though there are days when the poetry can’t quite hold all the heaviness, it still acts as a powerful bin holding as much baggage as I can drop in.

In times where the bin is full and the heaviness still persists, I know it is time for me to be.

Thank you for reading.

If you liked this story, come check out my Substack: Thoughts To Hold Onto