How Seneca, a single Buddhist idea, and Lighthouses set me straight
📍 Washington, DC
I am going to coach basketball again because I’ve been thinking about death a lot.
Six months ago I turned 30. In some ways, it feels like my midlife point. My grandparents died young, and I often remember something I heard years ago, that time goes by faster as we age, because we experience each passing year as a smaller fraction compared to the years we’ve already lived.1
My way of coping (before eventually seeking the services of a professional therapist, which should not be discounted) was to pick up a book of the Seneca letters.2 I knew I’d find help there.
I must have turned to Letter 4, called Coming to terms with death in my translation… “Death is where you are headed anyway! Why do you deceive yourself? Do you realize now for the first time what has in fact been happening to you all along? So it is: since the moment of birth, you have been moving toward your execution. These thoughts, and others like them, are what we must ponder if we want to be at peace as we await the final hour. For fear of that one makes all our other hours uneasy.”
Or maybe it was Letter 26, Growing Old… “There’s no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, so you must wait for death at every point.”
No, I’ve found it in Letter 1 (obvious in hindsight)… Taking charge of your time… “Convince yourself that what I write is true: some moments are snatched from us, some are filched, and some just vanish. But no loss is as shameful as the one that comes about through carelessness. Take a close look, and you will see that when we are not doing well, most of life slips away from us; when we are inactive, much of it—but when we are inattentive, we miss it all. Can you show me even one person who sets a price on his time, who knows the worth of a day, who realizes that every day is a day when he is dying? In fact, we are wrong to think that death lies ahead: much of it has passed us by already, for all our past life is in the grip of death.”
Those last two lines rocked me. Dying wasn’t just some event in the future. It was a constant, ongoing process. I had already died 30 years.
You know that question people ask, “What would you do if you were going to die today (or tomorrow, or in a year)?” I think of it as very similar to “What would you do if money didn’t matter?” Or another, “What will you do when you retire?” I have no trouble answering the sort: do a PhD program and coach high school basketball. (By PhD program, I supposed I only mean serious, multi-year study, and by coaching high school basketball, only helping young people grow in the setting I best know how.) If I am dying every day, I better hurry up.
Fear is what has held me back.
Indeed, I used to coach.
After a modest playing career at the Division 3 level (coincided with two years of impassioned research in the “sociology of basketball”), I knew one thing when I graduated in 2017: I wanted to coach. So when I landed in Phoenix, Arizona, having chased my college girlfriend to her hometown, I lined up my launchpad into coaching before I even had a real job (or our own apartment), securing a high school volunteer coaching role before accepting the first day job I could find that would allow me the flexibility to coach (as long as I got my work done!).
I would work from 6am to 2:30pm before racing over to practices or games, often returning home at 10pm to get ready for the next day. I also had ambitions of landing an entry level job in the NBA, ideally as a player development assistant, secondarily as a basketball operations assistant.3 So during the high school offseason, I’d fill that after-school slot by helping out with on-court workouts for NBA professionals and NBA hopefuls. If I had time outside of that, I’d devote it to a group running youth academy-style training with 3rd- through 8th-graders.
After three years of a 40 and 40 (40 hours a week studying, coaching, or networking for basketball + 40 hours a week at my actual job), I stopped coaching in March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. By then, I was volunteering with a talented AAU team of 8th-graders in New York City.4 As the shutdown turned from weeks to months, much of the youth basketball world fell back into place, returning to business as usual outside of sort-of wearing masks. I did not return to the sidelines during the heights of Covid, as did so many for whom ball is life.
It wasn’t just the Covid. I did not miss the game like I thought I would, which I smugly took as a sign of my own mental health. Covid had become a convenient excuse to indulge in a respite — from the game that had given me so many scars, and from the anxieties I was prone to, and the waves of meaninglessness I’d sometimes feel about investing so much into a round ball and 10-foot hoop, and the discomfort I felt about my place in the game and the roughness of its industry (too macho, too Machiavellian).
Life was much easier not spending every moment of free time in transit to, preparing for, or actually coaching. I spent my downtime jogging, working through a breakup, studying for the GRE, and applying to graduate school. Before long, I didn’t really think about coaching at all.
I told myself I would come back to it eventually. After I’d conquered myself, my career, the world. Psychologically, I desired armor — power and legitimacy. And so I sought real (as in quantitative, as in Microsoft Excel) skills, an extra degree from a name brand place, and financial independence. I told myself that once I was all better, I’d come back to coaching, as some kind of spotless version of me, able to impress the players I would work with by how much I know, what I’d seen, what I’d accomplished. And, I’d always have the security of a fallback plan, with the network and resume and resources I’d accumulated outside of the game.
One MBA, five years, and three cities later, I’ve conquered nothing, certainly not myself.
Soon after I had picked up the Seneca letters, I was — much less seriously — watching season 3 of The White Lotus, the HBO hit series. If you haven’t seen it (*spolier alert*), it’s based in Thailand, where the daughter has bamboozled her family into vacationing as she scouts out the Buddhist monastery she’s eyeing for her post-college plan to retreat from the family and lifestyle and life trajectory she belongs to. Anyways, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about Buddhism, so after Googling the best books to fix that, I picked up The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thích Nhất Hạnh.
In the very first page, Nhất Hạnh assures: “Buddha was not a god. He was a human being like you and me, and he suffered just as we do. If we go to the Buddha with our hearts open, he will look at us, his eyes filled with compassion, and say, ‘Because there is suffering in your heart, it is possible for you to enter my heart.’” He continues, “The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
Like I said, until that very moment I thought I had to completely conquer everything in myself (the disappointment in my own playing career, and the anxieties and self-doubt which contributed to it) and in the “real world” (to appease my inclination toward caution) in order to come back to my coaching. To do anything else had seemed fraudulent, assuming a role of some authority and teaching others when it is I who needs teaching. I’m not all better, but this Buddhist idea suggested that might be tolerable, or even the entire point.
There was one more idea that put me over the edge: lighthouses.
I was at a conference for work recently and met someone I hope to stay in touch with forever. In a professional context that privileges our proclivities — to seek more, do more, impact more people, impress more people, sell more products, gain more followers — she shared a lesson I never want to forget, in the form of a quote from the writer, Anne Lamott: “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”5
It was so easy for me to think about the “lighthouses” I know. Many of them are basketball people. Some of the realest, most thoughtful, humble people I know have been basketball coaches, trainers, executives:
- My 6th-grade AAU coach, who brought me onto a team with players way beyond my caliber, and awakened the potential within me as a player for the first time (and forever).
- The longtime player developer who turned down an NBA GM job to prioritize his family, and whose Facebook posts compel me to log into the platform periodically, solely to read his casual notes on how to be a husband and father.
- My assistant coach in college (now a head D3 coach), who I’m sure would do a great job at the D1 level for 3x the salary.
- My freshman coach in high school, who was the best coach in the building.
- An NBA Assistant GM, who, after becoming an international scout for an NBA team as a recent college grad, ran a faith-based community center for 12 years, the last few of which were also spent earning his law degree as a middle-aged evening student, before it eventually took a handful of years to break back into the league as an executive.
- The two head varsity coaches I learned the ropes from in Arizona, beacons in their communities for decades, with a combined 1,000+ wins.
- The D2 coach who, amidst a hostile local landscape, knelt in solidarity with his players, who knelt in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who knelt to protest systemic racism.
- The leadership consultant who invests the same level of attention and care to clients whether they be college students, NBA champions, middle managers, nurses, or realtors.
Those are the lighthouses in my life. And I want to lean into their examples as I start my coaching journey anew.
Along the way, I want to use this space I’m calling Ball Philosophy as a lighthouse as well, to:
- Explore how to apply wisdom from outside of sports, to coaching.
- Examine the modern, everyday philosophies within sports culture today — the beliefs, assumptions, and culture — that I observe within myself and others.
- Reflect on my efforts to put it all into practice.
When I think about who I’m writing this for, I think about this quote from Seneca’s Letter 7, himself quoting some other unknown person, who supposedly, when asked why they devoted so much effort over a work of art that very few people would ever see, answered: “A few are enough; one is enough; not even one is also enough.”
Zach Moo Young (Coach Moo)
- As in, we tend to perceive year 11 as 10 percent of the life we’ve lived, but year 101 only feels like 1 percent of our life. ↩︎
- Written around 2,000 years ago, so many of these letters feel like they could’ve been written today. My first meeting with Seneca was 10 years ago as a college student. I heard his name a time or two, along with “Classics” and quickly thought, not for me. The second meeting was at the start of the pandemic, as I experienced what felt like a devastating loss, and was looking for help coping. That led me to dig up Tim Ferriss’s “4 Ways to Overcome Soul-Crushing Defeat,” the fourth being to read the Seneca letters. I read a few that called out to me, and it certainly helped get my mojo back. I expected they would help me again. (This is the translation I’m using.) ↩︎
- I think I got close a couple times! ↩︎
- Including, unbeknownst to me, someone who will likely soon become a first round NBA draft pick, which would be the second time I had no idea I was coaching a future NBA player. ↩︎
- The quote comes from the book “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” by Anne Lamott, which was published in 1994, the year I was born. I picked it up, and I can concur, it quickly became one of my favorite books. ↩︎
Ball Philosophy 