Reflections on Reading "There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” by Hanif Abdurraqib

On learning it's okay to take the easier path

Several weeks ago I spent the night away from home in a sleep lab. It was a strange experience of sleeping in a narrow bed, with more electrodes that I could count taped to my face, hair, legs, chest, fingers. A microphone was attached to my throat, there was a camera in the room to record me as I slept and a person who watched me to notice any abnormalities. Weeks later, I met with a doctor to review the results and learn more about my sleep, a part of my life that until now, I was clueless about. It was a fascinating experience, and it taught me about sleep patterns that shape my life.

One of my reflections afterwards was that comparison is a useless sport, and that health is a collective, intergenerational, historical experience not an individual one. As much as we are bombarded with messages about setting habits and doing affirmations and drinking the right smoothies and lowering cortisol and having morning sunshine and having protein and doing particular workouts or doing a multi-step skin routine and (the list goes on) our health is shaped by factors like race/racism, like colonialism, like the place you live, like the kind of work you do, like the things that make you you on a cellular level such as the level of oxygen you are getting, and the amount of sleep that powers your body. These are factors that will not shift with more determination and can-do spirit. Individualizing health misses out so much key information and makes our health outcomes seem like our own individual successes and failures rather than products of much larger systems. And so to compare oneself with someone else shaped by entire different cells and different systemic factors is an exercise in futility. You are comparing your trajectory to just another boat passing you in the night. You may be in the same water, but you are entirely different vessels.

I recently read Hanif Abdurraqib’s tremendous book “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” and one of the greatest takeaways from this book for me is the importance of individual definitions of success. There is no “best city”, there is no “best relationship” and it is okay to choose simplicity and ease. Hanif Abdurraqib is Muslim, and his last name means servant of the All Observant, or the All Watchful. Abdul meaning servant, al-Raqib being one of the 99 names of God in the Islamic tradition. The Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali describes the particular name as being about observing with a constant and persistent gaze, and caring for something to the point of never forgetting it.

And there is no better way to describe this book as an act of witnessing and observation. It is structured as a basketball game with four quarters, a pregame, and countdown clocks in each quarter. Paragraphs are contained within these countdown clocks, with sentences spilling from one section to another without a pause. It is a book seemingly about basketball, but really this is a book about so much more. This is a book about being from places others may deem unworthy, about loving the places one comes from though others may ignore them, about mortality, about the power of leaving and staying, about the love for hometowns that other people might not understand, about the self-love that is required to return to oneself over and over again and forgive oneself, about what it means to experience heartbreak and deep loss, about what it means to protest in the face of systemic oppression and state brutality.

I cried multiple times while reading this entire book - in part because it is a truly beautiful read, in part because I have not read many books by Black American Muslim men, in part because I know what it is like to be from a place people think they know but they don’t, and in part because it is an astonishingly transformative thing to be gifted with someone’s vulnerability. This book softened my heart because Hanif Abdurraqib is someone who has learned to be with pain and beauty and loss, who embodies mercy, softness, strength, clear eyed seeing and witnessing, and refuses to let go of dreaming. Who is a witness to his city, who points out the things at the edges that many of us would not notice on our own.

It is a book about heartbreak and longing. It is a book about Ohio. It is about what it is like to leave and stay in cities and relationships when the exit seems “like a much easier path than any path to rebuilding.”¹ Abdurraqib writes in paragraphs and pages that are sometimes single sentences that pause only long enough to take a a breath, before launching into more details that unfurl the moment he is sharing with you. It is delightful. In it he shares stories about the bad circumstances strung together that led to him becoming unhoused, about how you find your way back. The experience of reading this book and his stories is to have your heart fill until it is overflowing with emotions that flow out of your eyes.

This book and my learnings in the sleep lab have made me think a lot about focusing on my own experiences and goals, not comparing with anyone else, and about what it means to hold commitments to yourself. Because before the commitments to work, to a spouse, to family, to community, there are the promises and commitments you make to yourself.