on love and expectation

Spike Lee and walking with the weight of the world.

If you were at the center of the world, could you stand the attention?

Could you stand the eyeballs of everyone you passed gravitating towards you? Could you stand the pressure the world brings with it, the expectations and the demands?

In Spike Lee’s He Got Game, Jesus Shuttleworth is a profoundly popular high-school basketball prospect. His game is undeniable, but neither is the pressure he consistently takes on: from colleges, from agents, from opponents, from the media.

But clouding over every decision he makes, every person he talks or doesn’t talk to, is a loved one. A loved one that has not been a part of his life for a while, but has loomed over his personality. A loved one who made his fair share of bad decisions in the past yet still wanted to determine his family’s future. It was his father, Jake, and he had just gotten released from prison.

At the center of the world, and at the center of this film, is a person trying to distinguish between who loves them and who simply cares for them. Between a person who is there for them now and a person who will be there for them later.

When you’re the center of the world, relationships that should be unconditional can become conditional. The people closest to you stop asking what you want and start telling you what you’re capable of, as if potential is the same thing as obligation, as if being good at something means you owe it to everyone to become great in exactly the way they’ve imagined.

At the climax of the film, Jesus does what he does best, only this time with his father. One-on-one, the terms brutally simple: if Jake wins, Jesus goes to his father’s desired school, and if Jesus wins, Jake returns to prison and they never speak again. Winning something may mean someone loses everything.

As people, we make our most consequential decisions not in moments of clarity but in the murky territory where love and obligation become indistinguishable. But we are not the center of the world. We may not carry the attention of millions, of thousands, but we do carry the attention of tens of those in our lives.

Jesus wins and his father, to his dismay, is sent back to prison. He earns the right to walk away clean, and the terms are clear — he never has to see Jake again, never has to carry the weight of his father’s mistakes or desperate need for redemption.

And then Jesus chooses his father’s school anyway. The game gave him freedom, but freedom wasn’t enough. The game gave him attention, but attention wasn’t enough. The heaviest weight that he carried, the catalyst for his decision, was not the eyes of millions. It was the knowledge that someone he loved was still waiting to see if he would choose them over himself

At the center of the world, or at the center of just ten people’s worlds, the question remains the same: when the person you love needs something from you that costs everything, can you stand the attention of knowing they’re watching, waiting, hoping you’ll choose them despite every reason not to.