The boys have taken up a new scoring system. It was conceived by The Kid but now adopted by Little Brother as well, this mental recording of “problems and benefits” as TK first named it, detailing each to me immediately upon seeing me at school pickup. They’re at basketball camp a couple of days this week during the school break, and the system is used for this too: a best and worsts of the day, itemised in the form of a scoreboard between two teams of the boys’ choosing (NCAA this week, in honour of the recent championship).

So in a few hours I’ll find out if Baylor beat TCU or Gonzaga was squashed by Kansas.

This winning and losing, black-and-white analysis of the world is common among children and hard to resist for adults, this one at least. Good and evil has a comfortable, familiar ring to it, especially when I’m always on the hero side. It’s easier to choose a lane than admit where we actually are: sitting in the middle, on the line (between good and evil) that runs through each of our hearts, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; permanently residing in the tension that characterises all of life.

I think about this tension–this push and pull of existence–when I run in view of our beaches, the water sweeping up the shore and receding back; my ever-uttered prayer of “I’m grateful but” that is its own scorecard; the pain and elation of a cold-water swim. Nothing, it seems, can be purely good or bad unless we assign it those qualities and write it off as such; dealing with the tension requires a fortitude, a self-knowledge, a strength beyond ourselves and what we can see. And maybe just more time than we feel we have for it.

I picked up a little memoir at the library recently because there it was, staring me in the face from the “Read in 10 Days/No Renewals” section, and while I won’t be attesting to its literary value, I was caught by a line at the beginning, an observation of a locale familiar to the author: “How beautiful it all is…and also how sad.”

I mean, the tome is not on track to win the Pulitzer–there have been countless moments when I’ve pushed through sections that the boys would call cringe, and I’m pretty sure my face has been that grimace emoji for the duration of my reading it–but that little sentence, it got me. Just like Sunday’s episode of Succession did, when those maturity-challenged adults, in the throes of grief, who typically do nothing but posture and avoid talks of feelings, kept naming theirs to each other in what had to be the most repeated line of the hour: “I’m sad.” Then the next lines would be something like “Chuckles the Clown? I think not,” and I would find myself laughing through tears, which is actually my favourite emoji because it’s so true.

Yesterday I went to the ballet with my friend and near the end of the first act, a kerfuffle of sorts occurred two rows behind us. While the band played on and the performance continued, a woman was attended to by a doctor then carried out, all of us wondering (and never finding out) what happened. All of it set to centuries-old orchestral music, all of it facing a stage full of dancers. Life and the show going on beside each other.

In this moment I am older than I’ve ever been and younger than I’ll ever be, straddling tension all over the place with a neck that could have been lifted if I hadn’t taken (failed) that stupid dental exam. I’m sitting with my feet on the dog, cold from the grey autumnal rain from a few minutes ago that has switched to a blazing sunlight and will probably go back and forth a few more times, on the ill-advised cream-coloured sofa that we bought because the boys are no longer pissing and shitting themselves (as much) so that should be safe, right? No, says the sweat and dirt and life that has darkened these cream sofas into more of a dusty tan, which is fine (I say…I’m grateful but) because perfection is boring anyway.