Author: Benjamin

So if spring is the time for Planting, summer the time of Fruition, fall the time of Harvest, and winter the time of Rest and Recuperation, then would I say that over the nine seasons I have practiced the Free Refills project that I have Planted Seeds on each of the spring equinoxes, began to bring things to Fruition on both summer solstices so far, have Harvested each fall equinox, and put everything to Rest and began quietly again each winter? I’ve been aware of those energies, but, really, things have been pretty consistent around here for all nine seasons. I write my 5000 words per week, I publish every weekday. There’s nothing that particularly indicates that anything has changed besides, perhaps, my acknowledgment of the change of seasons.

That I was finally able to put the summer solstice to name, to call it Fruition, brought me to a different idea and understanding of what those seasons might mean. I thought, “Maybe I have been in Planting a Seed this whole time.” It makes sense, after all. In many ways, I’ve been doing the same thing all along, just continuing to work and waiting for clarity regarding exactly I’m doing, hoping that the work itself would guide me. And maybe, with the recognition that summer is a time of Fruition, it finally has. Even though it’s been two-and-a-quarter years of Free Refills so far, this whole period, really, has been about planting seeds. And now it is time for that to change.

If you’ve been a long-time reader of Free Refills, you know that I see each change of seasons as an auspicious time, and that I believe the energy of the seasons can and should guide us in the ways we approach our lives.

Each season has a particular energy to it. Spring is the time for planting, of course, and fall is the time for harvest, and the winter solstice is the day of symbolic death and rebirth, leading into a time of rest, quiet, and recuperation.

However, I have had trouble giving name to the energy of summer. In summer I see fullness, but I was unable to figure out how that should guide me until I attached a new word to the summer solstice and the summer season that follows: fruition. Summer is the time for bringing things to fruition.¹

Happy Summer Solstice. Let us now begin to bring things to fruition.

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¹ Interestingly, I learned this today:

The original meaning of fruition had nothing to do with fruit. Rather, when the term was first used in the early 15th century, it meant only “pleasurable use or possession.” Not until the 19th century did fruition develop a second meaning, “the state of bearing fruit,” possibly as the result of a mistaken assumption that fruition evolved from fruit. The “state of bearing fruit” sense was followed quickly by the figurative application to anything that can be “realized” and metaphorically bear fruit, such as a plan or a project.

Source here.

Obviously I meant fruition in the sense of “state of bearing fruit,” but I like the meaning “pleasurable use” as well.

I watched the Champions League final more out of obligation than any sense of joy, which feels so very weird for me to say. There was a time, way back when, when I wouldn’t miss a Real Madrid match on TV (of course there were far fewer of them back then), and the idea that I’ve stopped caring mightily about the Champions League final feels very very strange indeed. I didn’t even know what sort of injuries Real was dealing with–I thought I remembered that Gareth Bale had missed the round previous–and I knew basically nothing about Juventus except that Gigi Buffon was their goalie.

The thing is, I’m finding it increasingly hard to care about soccer right now. It’s not just that there are too many matches for a spectator to care about. It’s that there are too many matches for the players to stay in top form, and so too much of each season is just a grind. I would ask, “Who has time to watch something like that?” but I guess the answer is many many many people. I mean, I used to be one of them.

Anyway, it turned out to be an enjoyable match. The first half saw well-matched, fluid play, and two goals of utter footballing wizardry. The perfection of Cristiano Ronaldo’s pass to dead-sprinting Dani Carvajal for the first goal makes no sense to me. Surely Carvajal is screaming the whole way, but from what I can tell Ronaldo never once glances in his direction, and yet the pass is inch-perfect. Is bat-like echo-locative hearing also one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s abilities?

And while Mario Madzuckic’s bicycle kick lob goal was also a wonder to behold, it is the build-up play for that goal that blows my mind. Leonardo Bonucci hit a 40-yard diagonal to a streaking Alex Sandro, who volleyed his cross into the middle, where Gonzalo Higuaín chested it down and volley-passed it to Mario Mandzukic, who chested it down and then volley-bicycle-kicked it for the goal. I mean, what can you say about that but holy shit? The damn ball didn’t touch the ground again after Bonucci sent it on its way. Amazing. Mandzuckic’s goal also shows just how incredible the goal sensibility of top players really is, that he can be facing directly away from goal for a substantial period of time and still hit a ball with that kind of accuracy. Yes, there was some luck, but it wasn’t just luck. His sense of where he was in relation to the goal and where Keylor Navas was likely to be in relation to him is simply that well developed.

(I would love to embed a video of the goals I’m speaking of, but I can’t find one. If you have better luck than me, would you post a link in the comments?)

So it was 1-1 at halftime, and looking relatively even. And then the second half happened.

One wonders what halftime in the respective locker rooms looked like. I have to imagine that the Juventus locker room looked like every classic sports film we’ve ever seen (except in Italian). I imagine Massimiliano Allegri congratulating his squad on a well-played first half and exhorting them to greater heights in the second.

Meanwhile, over in the Real Madrid locker room, I imagine Zinedine Zidane standing in utter silence. All the players are looking at him, waiting patiently. The lighting is dim, indirect. No one says anything. It’s cool in there, almost cave-like. And then Zidane says, quietly, “It is now time to show the world what you can do.” And the players all nod their heads silently in assent, then return to the pitch, in order to display the incantatory power of those words.

Because the second half looked like a game of sharks-versus-seals. Real Madrid were just that much better. Juventus had given up three goals total through their Champion’s League campaign to that point. Real Madrid scored four in 90 minutes.

And what are we supposed to make of Zinedine Zidane as a manager? He led Real Madrid’s B-team to consistent mediocrity before being given the job of managing Real, which is merely the single most scrutinized managerial job in all of footballdom, and that’s before trying to appease insane club president Florentino Pérez. After a season-and-a-half at the helm, Zidane has managed to win the league once and the Champions League twice. How the hell is that even possible? You could, I suppose, argue that the Champions League wins were just radical good fortune (but I won’t–you don’t take down Juventus’ defense like that without playing brilliant football), but to finish ahead of Barcelona over a 38-match league season requires a level of consistency that can only be achieved by being actually, you know, really good.

How much of the credit do you give to Zidane? After all, it’s not like he’s actually one of the people kicking the ball around. The squad is full of world-class players. But results of this consistency would seem to suggest that Zidane’s years being one of the greatest players in the world equipped him to be one of the greatest managers as well.

Every week the chaos in our society seems to deepen. That is our trajectory now, and it will continue to be our trajectory until enough people stop irrationally seeking magic from our erstwhile leaders–“I’ll bring back all the jobs!”–stop enabling chaos through their own destructive anger, and start seeking balance within themselves. The problem is not those people. The problem is not out there. We are the problem. Our lack of balance is what’s creating this situation. It is only in seeking balance that the problem can be solved.

Simona Halep led 6-4 3-0. To this point in the match, Halep had been the better player, handling Jelena Ostapenko’s superior firepower with her own superior movement, and letting Ostapenko unforced-error herself into trouble. It looked like Halep was going to win.

Ostapenko was serving. Her serve had been shaky all day, but she was first to game-point at 40-30. Halep won the point to force deuce, then won the next to take the advantage. Ostapenko forced Halep into an error to save the break point. An Ostapenko unforced error gave Halep another chance. Ostapenko hit a forehand winner to bring things back to deuce. Ostapenko double-faulted to give Halep a third break point. Halep hit an unforced error to even things again. Three chances was all Halep got. Ostapenko won the next two points and the game.

Surely it would have been over at 4-0. But now it was 3-1. Then Halep got broken for 3-2 and back on serve. Halep jumped to a 15-40 lead in Ostapenko’s next service game. Surely Halep will convert one of these, I thought. If she does, I predicted, she will stop the bleeding and win the match. But she didn’t convert, and the match tied up at 3-3.

Then Halep got broken again. She broke back, but then was broken yet another time. Ostapenko held serve and the match was tied, one set all.

Perhaps there at 3-0 Halep took a little off, or perhaps Ostapenko finally got over her nerves, or perhaps it was both, but in the second set and on to the third Ostapenko seemed to dial in. In the first set, she hit 14 winners to 23 unforced errors. In the second it was 22 to 18. In the third, 18 to 13. Her service return was particularly lethal. She rifled down-the-line return winners on point after point. It was fun to watch; her play made me laugh. Ostapenko is delightful that way, just blasting away every chance she gets.

Halep had her chance with those five break points over those two games, and it seemed later that the favor of the tennis gods swung the other way after that. At 3-3 in the third, with Halep serving at 30-40, Ostapenko hit a backhand down the line that was going to land a couple of feet out–but instead it clipped the net cord, bounced straight up, and landed just inches inside Halep’s side of the court. Ostapenko threw her hands up in apology, but we don’t have to apologize when the gods smile down on us. Perhaps Halep knew then that it wasn’t to be her day.

The last point of the match came with Halep serving into the ad court. Ostapenko stepped up to the ball, for the however-manyth time that day, and blasted a backhand down the line. Halep never had a chance at it, and 20-year-old Jelena Ostapenko won the French Open.

Let’s hope Ostapenko keeps it up. I hope there’s no hangover going into Wimbledon. I want to see her do the same thing there.

Besides La Décima, of everything else that happened during the French Open, it was Novak Djokovic all but sprinting scared from the court during and after his third set against Dominic Thiem that my mind keeps coming back to. To think that a year ago, he looked absolutely invincible. Now, he floats along in a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a wide, wide ocean, and lacks any obvious means of propulsion.

I was going through old recordings on the DVR, and I happened to find the last fifteen minutes of the final of last year’s U.S. Open. The narrative of the Open going into that match was, “See, this summer was just a blip. Novak is back in the final.” But I believe strongly now that his erstwhile success there hid just how big the problem he was facing really was. It took him four sets to get out of his first round match against Jerzy Janowicz, the kind of player he was beating six months earlier in a fashion that looked more like a workout on the practice court than an actual competitive match. He got a walkover in the next round, then his opponent retired just six games in in the third. Yes, in the fourth, he dispatched Kyle Edmund in three easy sets. In the quarters, he got up two sets to none against Jo-Wilfred Tsonga before Tsonga retired. He looked shaky in beating Gael Monfils in four sets, Gael Monfils who played a strange, almost disrespectful match, appearing to want to annoy Novak more than actually play against him. Monfils admitted afterward that he simply didn’t believe that he could actually beat Novak Djokovic, which I promise you guaranteed that he couldn’t. But all of that was forgotten as Djokovic made the final. He made the final! Novak is back!

He won the first set in that final in a tiebreak, but he lost the second and third and, at the point where my recording started, was down a break in the fourth. Over the course of the match, he’d been pretty much comprehensively outplayed by Stan Wawrinka. During one of his final return game, the camera caught him wearing a look on his face just like we saw last week against Dominic Thiem. It was not just that he was losing, and he didn’t like to lose. He looked, instead, like a man utterly lost. Like the question he was asking himself wasn’t, “Why can’t I win today?” but instead, “Who is this person in what used to be my body?”

Calling Rafael Nadal the best clay-court player of all time is kind of like calling the Sun the brightest star in our solar system.

La Décima

In Sunday’s final of Roland Garros, there was a remarkable moment when Stan Wawrinka–down love-40 in his first service game in the second set, having lost the first set 6-2 without ever having really managed to get a toehold–turned his back to his opponent, Rafael Nadal, then took one of the balls he was serving with, held it and dug his teeth into it the way one would bite into an apple, and if ever there was a clearer statement of “My opponent will not be beaten today,” I have never seen it.

To Wawrinka’s credit, he battled on. He did not give up. He did not tank the final two sets. He played his best, but it was clear from the first points of the match that his four-and-a-half-hour, five-set war against Andy Murray two days prior had left his legs a little heavy, whereas Rafael Nadal had struggled to beat Dominic Thiem in the semis exactly as much as he’d struggled against all the other players he’d faced over this fortnight, which is to say not at all. On this day against Wawrinka in the final, it seemed possible that Nadal could have worn a heavy steel chain around his neck and a patch over one eye, like something out of “Harrison Bergeron,” and still won in straight sets, so much better was he than everyone else in the tournament.

Nadal ran through the tournament without losing a set. No one even managed to push him to a tiebreak. Over the course of seven matches, he lost a total of 35 games. He just turned 31 years old, and he was as dominant as he has ever been. It is not too soon to begin speculating about La Undécima.

Surely the other top players have been paying attention that the dominant players of this season have been Federer and Nadal, two great champions both thought to have been past their primes. They both took substantial, injury-enforced breaks at the end of last season. Their subsequent dominance is no coincidence.

One wonders how long before this insight filters down among the rest of the top players. High-level tennis is a brutally physical sport. Are the other top players brave enough to reach the obvious conclusion, that they will do better if they play less? The ATP wouldn’t like it, but might the players start to think that playing their best and maintaining their health and thereby prolonging their careers is better than the alternative? If the players are wise, we will soon see a substantial shift in how players–at least players around or older than 30–schedule themselves.

Since the election in November, we’ve turned our attention to how to live (and possibly even thrive?) in a society that’s deeply out of balance. Last week, I asserted that most people in our society are unhappy most of the time. Let me assert today that a society made up of mostly unhappy people is far more likely to seek out conflict rather than cooperation than one comprised of people who are in balance.

Consider, for example, President Trump’s decision last week to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. A recent national poll found that seven out of ten Americans support remaining in the agreement, and that a majority of self-identified Democrats, Republicans and independents all want to stay in the accord.

Trump’s decision to pull the country out of the accord, contrary to what a majority of Americans want, reflects my essential point that as a people out of balance, we are prone to or even seek out conflict. Trump, as someone who thrives in chaos, seeks (one hopes unconsciously) to sow seeds of chaos.

So what do we do about it? How do we alter that dynamic? If people out of balance are far more likely to seek conflict rather than cooperation, and if our society is succumbing to the impact of constant conflict, indeed, appears to be descending into chaos (and would you dare to claim otherwise?), then the single most radical and effective thing we can do as individuals is to short-circuit that dynamic by seeking balance within ourselves.

Forty-three years ago today, three days past my father’s forty-third birthday, his son was born. I was born forty-three years ago today.

(As birthday gifts go, that must have been something.)

It is not unusual for men to measure ourselves by our fathers. Today I am the same age my father was when I was born. What can I learn through my imagination of what he felt, who he was that day?

Like my father, I stand at the beginning of a new chapter in my life. Like my father, it’s clear what a key feature will be. On that day forty-three years ago, my father certainly knew that this helpless little creature would be a central, defining part of his life forever onward.

For me, today is marked not a presence but an absence. Something that was a central part of my life for many many years will soon be no more. Where I lose clarity is in that absence, in the void of what was there. How do I navigate when the major feature in my life is not what is there, but what is not?

Like my father forty-three years ago today, what I was is no more. For him, there was an eight-pound-whatever-ounce baby that told him, “Count this among the things that define you. You are now the father of an infant son.”

I see no such defining feature, only the negative space where what once was no longer is. What will fill that space? Who will I be?