While I Still Had It
An essay by Spike Humer
5 min readThe thought arrived on the balcony, before anything had happened to occasion it.
I’m going to be okay.
It came without a reason attached. That is what made it strange. I sat with the coffee going cool in my hands and waited for the second half of the sentence — okay because. Okay if. Okay as long as. Nothing came. The thought stood there by itself, and I did not know what to do with a thing that had no argument underneath it.
In 1984 I sat at a conference table with men who had degrees I did not have. Upper-mid management, an executive group, a room I had been invited into. I had a G.E.D. and night classes at a community college. They had MBAs. I remember the specific arithmetic of that room — who had finished what, who had come from where, and where that placed me.
And then a thought arrived that changed the direction of my working life.
If we were all dogs sitting around this table with a bone in the middle, I would be the one eating that bone.
It worked. I’ll say that much for it. But it would be easy to tell this as a story about confidence, and it was not that. It was not that I stopped feeling smaller than the men across from me. It was that I found ground where the measuring came out in my favor. They could do what I could do. They could not do what I had already survived to get into that room. I did not put the ranking down. I turned it over.
A man reaches for what is available to him. What was available to me was the certainty that I would fight harder for the bone than anyone else at the table. That thought put me in every room I entered for the next four decades, and I do not disown it.
It took me a long time to understand that the bone was never the point.
I did not need to win. I needed to be the one who would. The willingness was the whole of it — the standing offer, always live, that whatever the table required, I would meet it. My identity was not built on victory. It was built on readiness.
There is one table that does not take that bet.
It is not failure that closes the offer. It is arithmetic. There comes a season when the bone goes to someone younger, and it does not go to him because you were insufficient. It goes to him because that is how it goes. Every table I ever sat at rewarded willingness. This one does not care about it.
And a protector who cannot find a fight he can win does not stand down. He rehearses.
I have been rehearsing for weeks now. Money. The body. The slow inventories of aging. I have been running the disaster in every direction it can be run, and I have been doing it while the dishes were being cleared and the car was moving and the evening was going by.
The rehearsal is not idle. It costs something, and the cost is paid by whoever is sitting across from me.
Someone has been watching me these past weeks. She has not been watching a man who is failing. She has been watching a man who is not there. Present in the chair, absent in every way that would matter to her. And what I have seen in return — her attention going elsewhere, her energy finding other rooms — I first understood as judgment. It was not judgment. She was simply meeting the amount of me that was available, which was very little.
This is the part that is hard to say without flinching. The thing that spent forty years making certain I would never be diminished is the thing diminishing me now, at my own table, in front of the one person still sitting at it.
So there is the balcony.
Not resignation. I want to be exact about this, because the two look identical from the outside and they are not the same. Resignation is what happens when the fight goes out of a man — when he stops because he has nothing left with which to continue. That is not what happened. I could still fight. The willingness was intact. It was there in my hands, the way it has always been.
I put it down anyway. While I still had it.
That is the whole of what happened. There was no revelation. Nothing was healed. I set down a thing I was still fully capable of holding, and in the space where it had been, the sentence arrived with nothing underneath it.
I’m going to be okay.
The rehearsal is not over. It will start again, likely before the week is out, and the old thought will come to the table with its old competence, offering to eat.
But it came once with no reason beneath it. No bone in the middle. No one to out-last. Just a man on a balcony in the morning, holding a cup, okay for no cause at all.
That it happened once is enough to know the room can be entered.
—sh