Sharon’s blog: Day Books
Love to watch international football, especially La Liga (Spanish league). In particular, I like to watch the feet of the amazing Lionel Messi, who plays for the Argentina national team and La Liga’s Barcelona. It’s very frustrating to watch Barcelona play with the passing magic simply not functioning: the tick tock bonking. And it’s inexplicable. There one game, gone the next. It’s not just that one team defends against Barcelona better than another. The group rhythm that distinguishes Barcelona team play can’t get in touch with the ground and, paradoxically, can’t get airborne. There are still little flurries of the Messi genius, when the ball seems to have a magnetic attraction to his shoes. But the time-stands-still character of Barcelona at-its-best morphs into when will this game be over?
I did a lot of thinking about the nature of gravity. How sometimes it’s pull is helpful. How sometimes it seems to require such effort to transcend. And how interaction in a gravitational field can lose its glue. Maybe something was awry in the universe that day. Barcelona was having trouble getting the ball to Lionel Messi. I was having trouble holding my tree.
My eye kept leaving the television screen to fix on my own two feet, at rest. And I noticed that my toes were trying to flex — feeling for the ball maybe.
I still (of course) find watching fútbol fascinating. I love the flow and unexpected nature of the unfolding. Nothing happens for maybe 30 minutes and then, suddenly, the world changes. And everything happens. And it’s all about gravity. And it happens on a grid. That’s real perfection for someone like me: I love grids (I live in a city after all). And I find the pull of gravity thrilling, and mysterious. And the foot is at the root of it, the connection.