Damar Hamlin - A Shared Experience
On Monday I sat down on my couch, like you did, excited to watch the Bills play the Bengals, and through two drives it looked like it was gonna be a really great game. Then, on the Bengals second possession there was an apparent injury and a commercial break (normal), but when the broadcast returned, Joe Buck’s voice was different - serious, and over the next hour we watched a game quickly fade into meaninglessness as a young man, Damar Hamlin, was feverishly attended to by medics, and as his friends and family and teammates processed in front of us, in real-time, the agony of what they were experiencing.
You’ve seen the footage by now, so there’s no need to describe it - the raw emotion, the shock.
Over the past few days I’ve held Damar Hamlin in my heart while constantly checking for updates on his condition. I’ve never met him and I don’t know anyone who knows him, but I’m connected, invested in his recovery. I’m one of the millions that was watching and will remember where I was, and I’m attached to everyone else involved, even as a spectator, through the shared trauma of it all.
I hope this young man recovers and that he’s able to spend the next decade figuring out how to spend the millions of dollars that his little foundation (giving toys to kids) has raised. It will be a big job. And I hope he gets to see how his life has united so many people in hope.
But there’s something else,
Something here for all of us -
Getting to watch this happen, and getting to share the confusion and disbelief of the players, and getting to listen to Buck, Aikmen, Lisa Saulters, and the ESPN crew try to provide commentary as all of it is happening, and then getting to take to twitter and be part of the conversation was a very new experience for all of us. I use the words getting-to here on purpose, because the folks responsible for delivering all of this to us did a very good job, and it was a privilege to be part of it.
It’s always a privilege to be invited into someone else’s story, someone else’s struggle. It’s part of what I do on a daily basis, and in this very unique instance, tens of millions of us got to participate. A few of us have actually watched something like this before - a friend struggle to hang on while others give them a fighting chance, and we could sympathize with the people on our screens. The rest of us were just feeling the raw emotions that came up - the shock, fear, confusion - and as everything unfolded we knew it was all very important. Jennifer was upstairs packing for a trip and I hollered for her to come down and we sat together, through the messiness, until Buck turned it over to SVP for SportsCenter, and through it all we held our phones, refreshing feeds to stay updated, and I texted a few people to see if they were watching.
Humans are connected by shared experience, and then we need to talk about it, and process it, and watch the replays. We sit with one another and work out our feelings with words, and try to make sense of it. Sometimes the feelings are so raw, so deep, that people don’t have a language for them and I help give people that language. It’s the vocabulary of the inner world. Some might call it prayer, or intimacy, but no matter what, it’s messy - most good things are.
And the gift in all of this is getting to relate to one another on a heart/soul level. We get to share in common feelings, like a good meal at a familiar table. There’s no enemy here to unite against, just a hope to share and sadness to work through together.
Those of us who are more justice-centered are going to want answers and demand changes be made (and that’s a good thing), but still there are the feelings, and feelings invite us back into the inner world, back to the things that make us human and bring us together.
The people standing outside the hospital in Cincinnati holding candles and praying are there for Hamlin, but they are also there for themselves, and that’s ok. (Two things can be true at once). They need to be together, they know this moment is important, sacred even, and they want to be with other people who might be feeling the same thing, because feeling these things alone is too hard.
And this is how we heal,
And this is how we relate,
And this is how we get better,
And this is what will make us better,
Better friends, better companions, better people -
We enter into each other’s stories and we share the feelings and we don’t judge (because this is so messy), and we don’t jump to conclusions - we just wait, and feel. And we don’t have to have ever put on shoulder pads and played football to relate to sadness, and un-knowing, and what-if’s.
Feelings turn the world from black and white to color, and then we keep the stadium lights on (in blue and white) to show on the outside what we feel on the inside. And we tell each other where we were and what we were doing because we want to be known, and to be part of the story.
The gift for all of us in this is that it has opened a door for us into intimacy and vulnerability, to knowing and being known, and it’s a good space to be in. And as we watch and pray we also talk and process, the feelings from now connect to other feeling from before - the ones connected to things from a while back, to things that we haven’t thought about for a while, to things that we haven’t talked about for a while (maybe ever), begin to surface and we share them with others, and this is where some healing happens.
We remember, and We re-member our souls.
We uncover things, and then
We recover from other things that happened.
And we help each other to heal.
Talk soon-
Jeromy