Recently I read a book called "I'm Heading to the Field," and it stirred in me the wish to rekindle the embers of a hobby that has, by now, already gone cold like burnt-out charcoal—so I've decided to write. The reason I first picked up this book was the news that a planner I work with had published it, along with the memories of the years I spent playing futsal with colleagues at my first company.
The book is made up of stories written by the members of Pangyo's best women's futsal team—the reasons they took up futsal, their passion for the game, and an amount of effort beyond anything I had imagined.
Before I go on, I haven't yet mentioned my own hobby. My hobby, I want to say, was breaking. The reason it's in the past tense is that, as I said at the start, only a faint warmth remains in that burnt-out charcoal, and about once a month I roll around on the floor just so my body doesn't forget the memory of it.
An Unremarkable Beginning
Among the book's contents was a part about how they came to start futsal—some who wanted to free bodies grown restless while enduring the COVID era, and some who threw themselves into women's futsal after it grew popular thanks to the show Kick a Goal. Seeing these beginnings, I tried to recall what the beginning of my own hobby had been.
In college, simply to make my school days more fun, I joined a hip-hop club that looked like it would be enjoyable, and I got started after falling for a senior member's pitch that my body was well suited to breaking. If we call a hobby something people commonly take up because they find something fun-looking interesting and do it to get their own enjoyment out of it, then I think I, too, started mine much like people commonly do. It still amazes me how a hobby that started so unremarkably could ever have become something so remarkable.
Personally, I wondered whether the reasons for taking up futsal in "I'm Heading to the Field" weren't similar beginnings too. But reading about how futsal took root in their lives after they started, I felt envious of a passion that still seemed to blaze even now, and looking at my own passion gone cold, at a self that thinks not "right now" but "someday I'll do it again," I felt endlessly small.
Reckless Passion
I had taken a certain pride in believing I'd pursued my hobby with real passion and effort. But I want to say I was truly astonished by their passion for futsal that I saw in "I'm Heading to the Field." Judging by the book alone, the people I felt them to be were people who valued heading to the field more than heading to the office, who rejoiced more in their futsal team's victory than in a service launch, who dragged legs with torn ACLs toward the field.
Because there was so much in those earlier parts that resembled things that had happened to me too, I could read the book with even more enjoyment. Especially at the sight of someone dragging a leg with a torn ACL toward the field, the thought "at that point shouldn't you just quit?" surfaced alongside the memory that I, too, had been that way—and, thinking about what a reckless passion it must have been, I laughed.
Recalling the time I broke a finger and worried not about typing on the keyboard as a developer but about how I would practice, and the time I strained a toe ligament, went to the practice room in a cast, and did nothing but handstands for hours on end, I felt the warmth of a small ember trying to catch fire again.
The Happiness I Couldn't Find in My Retrospective
Earlier, after I wrote a retrospective on my ten years as a developer, I got feedback wishing there had been something about the good memories. What's really funny is that, while reading in the book about the joy of scoring a goal and of the futsal team's victories, the good memories that hadn't come to me at all during that retrospective came flooding back all at once from the memories of my hobby. Starting with the memory of the small happiness I felt when a move I'd struggled with finally worked, I recalled the day I passed a preliminary round in a competition for the first time and rejoiced like a child, and the deeply moving moment of winning a battle I'd entered.
The battles I commonly entered, as I mentioned, were street dance battles or breaking battles. Many people know of them these days thanks to the fame of Street Woman Fighter, but to explain a battle simply: it's a competition where you show off the moves you've prepared to the music a DJ plays, or dance freely to the music, and you win if the Judge chooses you. One battle I won was a very small competition called a "ten-thousand-won battle," where everyone pays a ten-thousand-won entry fee and the whole pot is handed to the winner as prize money. Truthfully, I won by riding on the coattails of the teammate I paired up with, but the joy of that moment felt like a dopamine explosion I'd never experienced in my life. In that overflowing joy I gulped down drink after drink, even though I can't hold my liquor, and, blackout drunk, I paid for a taxi from Suwon all the way to Seoul with the prize money.
Was it because these were activities I did to get enjoyment that the happy memories came back so easily, all at once? If so, then as I drift away from the hobby I once burned my passion for, does that mean I'll have no more happy memories to recall from now on? A bittersweet feeling washed over me. And then I sketched out in my head a plan to flail my way back toward happiness, and seeing that just making the plan made me happy, I was relieved that my happiness—and my passion—hadn't died after all.
I'm Heading to the Practice Room
Truthfully, "I'm Heading to the Field"—which I picked up without much expectation, drawn by the subject of futsal, thinking I ought to read a book written by a planner I work with—found my lost passion and happiness for me, and I want to thank the people who wrote it and Team Kakao. If there's anyone who once worked hard at something but whose passion has since gone cold, I'd like to recommend this book to them. And before the small flame of passion now lit within me goes out, I'm going to start heading to the practice room again.
"Let a man lose everything else in the world, but his enthusiasm and he will come through again to success."
- William Howard Arnold -