If you can survive yet another Rounders reference, read on.
Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) is standing on the threshold. If he turns around, he’ll become an attorney. If he steps forward, he’ll admit he’s a poker player. At the halfway point of the movie, he still thinks it’s possible to live both lives. And why wouldn’t he try? If he finishes law school, he gets to keep his girlfriend, whom he loves, and he gets a stable, lucrative career. But—and there’s always a but—the man is a poker player.
Our threshold scene is a conversation between Mike and his law school professor at a local pub in New York City. His mentor, the professor, has just seen who Mike really is, something Mike can’t yet see, as they talk about poker. The mentor sets his drink down and shares a story: his own parents wanted him to be a rabbi, but he knew, despite his parents’ expectations and his prodigious knowledge of religious texts, that he couldn’t be a rabbi. Because he “saw God” elsewhere, following that vision into law school and into a successful, meaningful career. But after, his devastated parents cut him out of their lives completely.
Mike looks down, pauses for a breath, then asks, “If you had to do it all over again, would you make the same choices?”
“What choice?” says the mentor.
To get here, to the threshold, where we know there is no other option than to be who we are, it requires we first be who we are not (as discussed last week). Then, we pay the costs and earn our wisdom. But this wisdom must be put to work. And we, like Mike, must inevitably take our seat at the poker table.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD
