On Quitting

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“I should just quit.”

That’s what I thought to myself one morning months ago while driving home from a particularly discouraging jiu-jitsu training. I had been stuck on the bottom again with the air smashed out of me, I had missed takedowns, and got submitted over and over. “I’m not improving, and I’m going to be stuck being a white belt forever,” was a sample of the lies I was telling myself.

And then I thought about football practice.

My Primal Instinct

In seventh grade, my parents enrolled me in my middle school’s football program. I didn’t want to do it. We didn’t watch football and I didn’t care about it. I just wanted to read Lord of the Rings in the air conditioning because I was smart.

Practices were brutal. I kept telling the coaches my helmet was too small, I had no idea how to shape my mouthguard, and it was August in south central Texas. I had never done anything this hard in my 13 years of life.

Before we even played our first game I had quit. I had to get a paper signed by all of my teachers confirming my grades were eligible to play, and I had forgotten to get one signature. So I was grouped with people who actually had bad grades and was forced to do the same punishments, consisting of sprints and up-downs and other diabolical tortures.

Well I thought that was utter BS so I walked off the field. It did not occur to me that this was simply an exercise in teaching me how to follow simple instructions, of responsibility. No, to me it was only arbitrary and punitive. I still remember the moment. As I walked away a boy named Coby called out, “Quitter!”

And he was right.

No Easy Way Out

It’s been 25 years since that happened—a quarter of a century—but I still think about it. Not necessarily with regret, but as a core memory that shaped me. I have this instinct to walk away when things get hard or pointless. I’ve had a lifetime of taking the easy way out, starting with football practice on that hot August day. It continued with school where I learned I could skate by with minimal effort to get a B. I didn’t try, I wasn’t disciplined, and I increasingly became soft, lazy, and mediocre. I was a child; I didn’t know how to do hard things for the sake of it.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.
–Mark Twain

This brings me back to my morose drive home, pouting behind the wheel because my inner fat kid was screaming at me. And it occurred to me: even though I quit then, I haven’t quit a lot of things since. I’ve wanted to, I’ve even tried, but in a lot of hard things in my life, I didn’t tap. I ignored the easy way out.

Here are some examples.

• I was broken and despairing after graduation from high school. I thought about suicide a lot and dabbled in self-harm. By God’s grace, I didn’t quit.
• I walked away from a group of my closest friends in college because I couldn’t figure out how to process the big emotions and insecurities I was feeling. By God’s grace, he brought me back to them and we are still friends to this day.
• More than once in college, and again after graduation, I considered packing up my truck and heading “west” somewhere. Just disappear and never be heard from again like Chris McCandless, except without the dying alone in Alaska part. I was considering New Mexico, where my dad had been a vagabond after leaving my mom. By God’s grace, I turned my truck around.
• I began to have panic attacks and was angry or on edge all the time. I couldn’t figure out why. By God’s grace, I got help (Jesus loves me this I know, for he gave me Lexapro).
• I became loyal, sometimes to a fault, and stayed in some jobs longer than I should have. I didn’t want to jump ship anymore. By God’s grace, I stuck it out even when it was hard.
• When it was going to take years to finish my graduate seminary degree at the pace of a class per semester, I considered stopping. By God’s grace, I finished.
• My wife and I have had several hard years of marriage. Our pastor who married us told us in premarital counseling that “divorce” shouldn’t even be in our vocabulary. In 2019 we came damn close to it. But by God’s grace, we didn’t.

And on and on.

Sometime in my 30s, I began telling myself that I had a lifetime of taking the easy way out, of being exactly what Coby said I was. But I realized on that drive home that simply isn’t true. Yes, I had a childhood of taking the easy way out, but I’ve had an adulthood doing hard things.

It’s true that I won’t ever put up the numbers on the barbell I could have if I had started lifting in middle school instead of when I was 31. It doesn’t matter; I pick up the heavy circles anyway. It’s true that a lifetime of eating processed foods has made me fat and full of estrogen. I can’t change that so it doesn’t matter and I eat real food now. It’s true that I will not be as good at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or any other athletic activity, as I would if I had started as a child. It doesn’t matter, I’m showing up with my gi on and a mouthguard I learned to mold.

My wife has helped me see this with some perspective. (She is good at that. Keeps me sane.) She helped me see that if I didn’t take these thoughts captive, or “winnow them” as Marcus Aurelius says, then I was going to quit this sport I loved so much.

I’m genuinely grateful for what Coby said to me that day, because, it was true, but I’ve been fighting it ever since.