The human body sheds. It’s just not as dramatic as a snake or cicada. On a seven year cycle our bodies shed a layer of skin cells. I try not to take this biological transformation for granted. In 2019, I interviewed jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings. He explained his decision to quit the saxophone and dedicate his creative life to the flute as part of his African ontology, which culturally and spiritually requires “you’ve got to sacrifice something if you’re going to make the transition from one stage of your life to another.” Shedding old skin isn’t entirely left to biology. Some cultures believe we have to earn our transformations through sacrifice.
Shabaka said he’d been planning for his 40th year of life as a significant turning point. He’d planned for a coalescence of the elements of his life to coincide with turning 40. It struck me because I’d also be 40 in 2024. What was I doing in preparation? Reviewing how I lived in 2024, there’s an understanding that the progress I made, the ways in which I pushed myself and made myself available to possibilities, might not see results for another two to three years. Do the math and that’s when I’ll have shed my next full layer of skin cells. When I heard Shabaka talk of preparation for 40 it rattled me at first. But, perhaps my preparation was less deliberate. I hesitate to call it instinctual. There’s a part of me that remains deeply and comically oblivious to my own nature. I’ve matured and made adjustments that feel more coincidental with turning 40.
I think sacrifice is too strong of a word to ever be applied to my life. I’ll let others choose to use it if they ever see fit.
Maybe I was listening to the wind when I launched Sacred five years ago. It does feel that way. I’ve always said I created Sacred after being inspired by a zine fair in Sacramento. Seeing a warehouse gallery full of zine makers who weren’t waiting for permission from publishers, but applied their merit and ingenuity to produce a publication, some hardbound, others sewn together with string, woke me up. The paradigm is shifting and it’s a bit fool-minded to expect the legacy institutions to find us and support us. Their design is exploitative. It is mining by another name. Each person can become their greatest resource if they teach themselves the tools of self-sufficiency and then protect that energy. It’s not guaranteed to work, and it has varying degrees of success (trust me there), but the feeling of being purely responsible to yourself is a form of freedom. Sacred is a form of freedom. It is neither financially empowering, nor financially ruining me, but currently that’s not the priority. The priority is for it to exist, evolve, and move without limitation—to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Being in my mid-30s and feeling as though I’d wasted valuable time was colliding with a growing understanding that no one was going to hand me a book deal. I never wanted to be a 20-something prodigy who found youthful success. I always understood writing as a patient long-game. Everyone I admired found their voice and breakthroughs in their 30s, if not decades later. I read more Henry Miller in his mid-50s than Miller at 43 when his first book Tropic of Cancer was published after two prior failed attempts. My best work will always be ahead of me. (And I feel that should go for all of us.) But, I also felt an inertia in my mid-30s that scared me. That feeling was essentially: get fucking serious because you don’t have forever.
I never thought I’d be playing basketball at 40. At. All. The last time I saw my dad play basketball was an alumni tournament; at 45, out there having not played meaningful ball in months, possibly a year, and he tore his ACL. I remember my mom chastising him that he had no business being out there. In the NBA that feeling of the game passing you up comes much earlier. It’s not tennis-young, but professional basketball has long been a young man’s game where the vets retire at 32 (a study by RBC Wealth Management puts the median age of retirement at 28). It’s only recently that players like Vince Carter have challenged Robert “The Chief” Parish’s legacy of playing until age 43. I doubt we’ll get an honest answer out of Lebron James when it comes to whether he expected to be in the league at 40. Lebron has an artful way of curating thoughtfulness that I don’t always trust. I’ll be checking his media interviews as we near his birthday on December 30. But, given that we’re both ‘84 babies from Ohio, I’ll be paying attention. Maybe he’ll surprise me.
In my interview this year with Hanif Abdurraqib, a fellow Ohioan and ‘84 baby, we discussed the parallels between hooping at 40, moving with new limitations while still desiring discovery, and being a writer, to which he offered the following:
I started so late. I didn’t start writing until 2012. I didn’t start taking it seriously. I hope I’m always finding new ways to do the work. Finding new ways to stay focused on the work. I do think in terms of inventiveness and risk taking, my relationship with aging has led me to be, I think, a writer who is more invested in saying I don’t have forever. The amount of time I have is not permanent. So I have to work as though I’m seeking something I’ve never seen before every time.
There’s a part of high school basketball that I cannot stomach: “hold basketball.” It’s the excruciating experience of watching kids be instructed by fearful coaches to run out the clock with a marginal lead and plenty of time on the game clock. Three minutes to go, five point lead, and the guards stand idol near half court. That type of inertia backfires. Sometimes you’ve got to keep playing, keep your rhythm, and keep the opposition on its heels. Even if it’s an upset situation. The ball finds energy and your team is operating on an energy deficit should you give up the lead. Hold Basketball in adulthood looks like running out the clock on a job you loathe every Friday of every year until you’ve reached a mandated milestone for retirement. When I think about writing in my 20s outside the journalistic jobs I held, the rest, the personal essay pursuits felt like Hold Basketball. I think that’s largely what changed five years ago. Prior to Sacred, I was holding the ball under the assumption that I’d win in the long run. Truthfully I was depriving myself of finding energy.
I don’t know if I’d call my decision to dedicate part of my writing practice to Sacred a sacrifice yet. I think the word “part” is profoundly operative. I’m still a music journalist. Today, in a small way, I proved I could interweave those two practices. Next year perhaps I’ll find news ways to align the two practices. Maybe it will take a decade. What I do know is that I feel activated when I’m writing, just like I feel activated when I’m playing pick-up. I hope to keep doing both well into old age. Or, with basketball, at least until I’m 46 so I can surpass my old man.
I’ll leave you with one more unpublished quote:
As an artist, you’ve got to do the thing that activates you the most. It might not even make sense in the short term. But at some stage, in the grand scheme of things it will make complete sense. It's a sacrifice… you’ve got to sacrifice something if you’re going to make the transition from one stage of your life to another.
- excerpt from an interview with Shabaka Hutchings
