Author: Benjamin

About this transition, how comfortable am I sharing details publicly? It’s kind of a funny question, because I know intellectually that the majority of the people who read Free Refills are people close to me, so they mostly already know what’s up. But in my head I have always treated Free Refills like I am writing to a much larger audience, to people who don’t know me personally. People who are here because they like the writing and want to see more of it.

This thinking is meant as an act of intention, of manifestation.

There’s a certain way that speaking of intention and manifestation always sounds a little cocky to my ears. One should be modest, yes? Except I am coming to believe that this sense that it is improper to treat and state your ambitions as already true is in fact a form of contraction. Something along the lines of Safer to not say such things, because if they were true or became true then they would necessarily open up expansion of self, and I would have no choice but to follow that expansion into the unknown. Much safer to stay here, stuck.

Contraction is a shitty choice. So let’s not do that.

All right, then. I write under the assumption of a broader audience because I know that day is coming. When the universe calls us, we can choose to answer, or not. But the universe does not call us only to pull the rug out from beneath us, stand over our supine bodies and cry triumphantly, “Psych!”

But so yeah. Hence my continued choice to allude to what’s going on rather than just saying it.

I’m going through a period of transition unlike any I’ve gone through since I got out of college. In a month or so, my life is going to look totally different. Isn’t that fun?

No, actually. It is not fun. A lot of the time it’s really sad.

Which is not to say that there aren’t moments of fun. I invited this change into my life, and I did it because of the firm conviction, arrived at after–trust me on this–ample exploration, that ultimately my life will be better for it. I can see expansion in my life already. Things are going to get better. My life is going to get better. I am going to be happier, more true to myself, more in flow with what the universe is asking of me and offering me.

But here in the middle of it, it is heavy and sad and overwhelming, and all I can do, day by day, is to try to put one foot in front of the other; and on those days in which I act out and do not do even that–those days when I play Game for six hours, or spend too much money having two cocktails too many–well, I see myself doing it, and I know why. I think I can forgive myself. Maybe somewhere there is some perfect version of me doing this all perfectly. I’m not that guy. I fuck up a lot. Still, I’m doing my best. And I trust that, through the promise of expansion, my best improves a little, every single day.

The last time I was in a period of transition as intense as the one I’m in right now was when I got out of college. In fact, right now feels a lot like that. As in: all the patterns and rhythms that govern my life (besides the natural ones, of course) are ending.

Most of our lives, we have a pretty good sense of what things will look like a month or two hence. We live in cycles, after all. Yesterday: the sun rose, the sun set. Today: the sun rises, the sun sets. Tomorrow: the sun will rise, the sun will set. In between: our lives. Cycles.

But right now I don’t know what to expect.

Like when college ended, the space of transition itself is clear enough. I will do this for a few weeks. I will move here. And then … unknown. True, the future is never more than a dream, but most of the time we can trust that there will be some resemblance between that dream and what occurs when the future becomes the present.

This is not where I find myself now. Orthographically I might write it thus: “Two months from now I will be ???”

There are words that I can fill in that blank with, and know they are correct. “Two months from now I will be writing.” Yes. That is true.

And this: “Two months from now I will be breathing.” And this: “Two months from now, I will be alive.”¹

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¹ Well, you know, unless I’m not. Shit does happen. But what am I supposed to say? “Actuarial data assigns a high probability that two months from now, I will still be alive.” Factually accurate, but rhetorically a handful of overcooked spaghetti. Life is much too short to be that mirthlessly literal, don’t you think?

In the pieces I write for TTW, I speak with a voice that implies a certain mastery of my subject. I suppose I’ve earned it. I bring a seriousness and intensity in my approach to these practices, and I also bring the training in close perception I’ve developed from all my years as a writer. That Jerry, who is certainly a master at the energy techniques we talk about, has given me his imprimatur to teach is quite a gift. I do not take his confidence in me lightly.

Nevertheless, I’m still less than three years into the adventure that started when Jerry first taught me to center and thereby set me on this path. Yes, I’ve seen vast changes in my life. Compared to where I was when I started, my sensitivity to what’s around me and my ability to deal with those things have gone off the charts. But in the grand scheme of things, I’m still something of a novice at all this stuff. Three years of exploring the practice of centering is far less than the 40 years I didn’t. And that means that sometimes I get overwhelmed.

There’s some deep turmoil in my personal life right now. Some days I navigate this well. Some days I pretty much go insane–I find myself unable to find center, my thinking gets utterly clouded, and I feel terrible. Some teacher I am, eh?

Except that I’ve walked too far down this path to ever turn around now, or even to much lose sight it. The other day, I felt bad, lost and sad and angry. I was badly out of center. But that I was out of center was part of my understanding of how I was feeling. I recognized it.

As I was trying to find my way back out of that oppressive grey mood, I knew to be seeking center. This approach is already too ingrained for me to do anything else. I didn’t succeed, by the way. It took Jerry’s help and experience to re-center me, and I moved back out of center rather quickly. But today, in a much better place, I can see the benefit of that apparent failure. Through the vulnerability of that experience, I can speak to how do deal with this stuff.

So what do you do when things get really bad?

In part, you let them be bad. You don’t fight their being bad, but you try not to feed the badness, also. Your perception of stuff is bound to be faulty, so try not to do anything rash. Don’t be shitty to people around you–in this kind of state, when everyone seems like an asshole, chances are that the actual asshole is you.

If there’s someone you can call on, someone whom you recognize has the ability to help ground you, call on that person. Don’t suffer though this alone.

But above all, know that little bits of self-care can make a huge difference. Even if things do not immediately feel better, doing something positive for yourself sets positive energy into motion. So go work out if you can. Now, if I’m sufficiently in turmoil, I might find the prospect of even going to the gym to be too much. But unless you’re in Antarctica or the middle of a hurricane, it’s pretty much always possible to go out for a walk rather than wallow in the unhappiness of the present time and place. A walk is great because the natural world is going to support you with its energy.

When I asked Jerry what I should write about this week, he replied “Something light and fun to give you something else to focus on. The lighter the better.” This piece, perhaps unfortunately, isn’t that.

But there is something to knowing that I am perhaps, even in this space, able to help others, that takes a lot of the weight off. Yes, things are hard right now. They’ll get better; they always do. I feel safe in saying this because I am paying attention, and it is true.

YO MAN DON’T MALIGN ME, AIN’T NO CLOUDS GREY ENOUGH TO DIMINISH THE RADMAN’S PIZZAZZ.

ENJOY TODAY’S SUNSHINE, CAPTAIN LUGUBRIOUS.

“The lighter the better,” Jerry advised when I asked what I should write about this week. But it’s hard to find much lightness on a morning as grey and gloomy as this one. On a day like this, even Ima Radster writes in lowercase.

Perhaps you saw that Rafa Nadal beat Dominic Thiem 6-4 6-1 to win the Barcelona Open this weekend, his tenth title there. This comes on the heels of his win in Monte Carlo, his tenth title there as well. If he wins Roland Garros, it will be his tenth French Open title.

The French is the Fashion Open. Last year, it was Adidas that had the most people talking about their clothes. Remember the zebra stripes that Adidas festooned the bulk of its endorsees with? Remember how Simona Halep looked like she was on her way to the dance club in her little frilled-skirt-and-faux-suspenders number?

So if you’re a designer at Nike, and Rafa has completed two Tens so far this season, and has a chance for the Really Big Ten at Roland Garros, do you dare allude to that in the clothes you’re designing for him for the French? Maybe an X behind the Rafa bull logo on shirts and shoes?

If Nike isn’t doing that yet, well, it’s a genius idea and they should pay me $100,000 to use it.

Ideas of Manifestation

I had the idea earlier this year that I would simply take my desire to take a trip to Europe this spring to cover part of the tennis clay court season–maybe Madrid and Rome–and simply make it happen. I added in the possibility of going to London to see one of the last ever matches at White Hart Lane before Spurs leave for a year at Wembley before moving into their new stadium for the 2018-2019 season. I looked at the calendar. Holy crap. The North London Derby could fit into that trip.

Did I dare? At the time, I was reading books about manifestation and considering just how much I wanted to believe them. I could make a case that I had the money. I could argue that this was a perfect opportunity to act “as if”: I want to write about tennis. To do that, I should attend major tennis tournaments, right?

I decided against it. I put my powers of manifestation into other parts of my life. These parts don’t have the same immediate gratification as “Trip to London to see Spurs play Arsenal at White Hart Lane! Trip to Madrid to see Rafa Nadal at the Madrid Open!” but one hopes what I am working to manifest now will in the future pay even greater dividends.

So I watched the match on TV.

Tottenham Hotspur 2 – Arsenal 0

Spurs have been on a massive upswing since Mauricio Pocchetino took over, but they have had to work to overcome a tendency to capitulate mentally when the going gets tough. Last season, you might recall, they chased Leicester all the way to the last matches of the season. Spurs held a 2-0 lead over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the antepenultimate game of the season–Spurs needing a win to keep themselves alive in the title chase–then gave up two second-half goals to draw and give Leicester the title. They followed that up with a loss to Southampton at the Lane and a final-game loss to already-relegated Newcastle at St. James’ to manage to finish third behind goddamn Arsenal. I was so disgusted by the abjectness of their late season performance last year (which I wrote about here) that I’ve only watched desultorily this season.

Which means I have only been partly aware that somewhere along the line, Spurs have become a group that go into most matches believing themselves to be the better team.

When you’ve been a Spurs fan for the period I have been (a bit more than ten years, starting when Prem games began to appear regularly on TV), you have probably come to view the North London Derby with a mixture of excitement and deep trepidation. You want Spurs to win so bad because you hate Arsenal, as is proper, but you know–you have witnessed–that most of the time, Spurs will somehow find a way to fuck it up.

So I won’t claim that I watched yesterday’s match from the position of smug superiority that I imagine Arsenal fans have watched most North London Derbies during the last twenty or so years, knowing both that they have the better squad and that their opposition are furthermore bound to discover a new way to lose. But I did witness a Spurs side that outclassed and outplayed Arsenal pretty much everywhere on the pitch. In the last ever North London Derby held at White Hart Lane, they looked like the better team, they looked determined to win, and they won.

I wasn’t there to see it. But I watched it on TV, and it was still pretty great.

St. Totteringham’s Day 2017 CANCELED

With that win, Tottenham assured themselves, for the first time in 22 years, of finishing above stupid Arsenal in the table. Perhaps unfortunately, this doesn’t feel magical. It doesn’t feel like some major victory. We still lost to Chelsea a week ago in the FA Cup semi-final, and with four matches left to play, we’re still four points behind Chelsea in the table. An FA Cup victory would have made the season special. A Prem trophy would make it amazing. But finishing above Arsenal? I love it. But it feels only like the start of something, not its finish.

After two days of on-snow practice and testing earlier this week, the Professional Ski Instructors of America awarded me my Children’s Specialist Level One certification. I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Piaget’s Stages of Development, Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, and much else besides. The PSIA claims I now have the tools to be a much better instructor of children than I was a week ago.

I’m skeptical.

Do I really need to be able to rattle off the levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy in order to understand that a child who is cold, hungry or scared is unlikely to learn well? Do I really need to define a four-year-old’s cognitive functioning as “pre-operational” (per Piaget) to know that she’s not capable of understanding complex or abstract instructions?

Let me be clear: I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything useful. I don’t mean to disparage the whole process. Here and there I recognized blind spots in my understanding. I’ll be able to approach certain situations with more clarity and confidence. That can only be helpful.

But consider: This week they told me that the colloquial name for the moral development stage that describes most nine-year-olds is “clever as a fox.” It’s nice that they told me that. But the better teachers of this principle were the nine-year-olds I taught back in January, who kept asking me, “Can we do this? Can we do that?” until I realized that they were testing the limits of my authority. The former I learned from a book and a class. The latter I learned by paying attention and being present. Which version of that principle is going to make the more lasting impression on my future teaching? In my relating to children in general?

In our last couple of pieces, Jerry and I talked about using the word open as a cue to connect with the present moment and feel a certain flow of energy within our bodies during the golf swing. If I were to attach the word open to the kind of technical instructions that most golf teaching relies on, I might come up with something like, “During the swing, the chest remains open as the shoulders rotate. The left arm stays extended at the elbow. The head stays up so that the left shoulder can turn freely under it.” Do you think we’d have been as successful in our practice if we had repeated those sentences to ourselves over and over again?

I can speak for both of us when I say that those kinds of instructions were the furthest things from our minds. Instead, we’ve witnessed the swings of great golfers, done our best to use centering to observe the truth of those swings, and noticed that a pro’s swing appears open. That is, there’s a resonance between the energy impression given by the swing and the energy we feel when we explore the word open.

Words have energy. We’ve said that again and again and again in these writings. I’ve devoted a substantial portion of my life to working with that energy. I don’t take that energy lightly. But I also don’t want to take it too seriously.

The risk of focusing on big, abstract theoretical models as representative of reality is that abstractions tend to focus energy in the head. If you aren’t careful, you might find yourself demanding that reality fit into your model rather than remembering that reality is reality, while your model is just a model. Rigid thinking tends to follow. Everything that fits the model is noticed, while everything that does not gets rejected.

On the other hand, with enough practice, the practice of centering will always reveal the truth of a given situation. Perhaps we’ll turn to words as a means to communicate that truth to other people. But if we’re truly connected to what we’re teaching, we won’t insist on the rightness of what our words communicate. We’ll ask that you come to center and explore their truth yourself.

I passed my certification; PSIA’s level-one certs are generally easy to pass.

I hate the cert process. It’s critical to professional advancement in the industry, but success in the PSIA (and, for snowboarders, its sister organization, AASI) means buying in whole-heartedly to an entire worldview of the “proper” way to teach skiing, the underlying assumptions of which I substantially disagree with.

At the same time, each time I’ve gone through the certification process, I’ve found myself deeply humbled by what I witness from the other instructors participating in the exam. They devote great energy to becoming both better athletes and better teachers. They’ll spend years working on improving their skills and their craft.

The end result? If they work very, very hard and reach the highest certification levels, they can, by working full-time, earn, at best, barely enough to scrape by.

Students pay handsomely for instruction–full-day private lessons at resorts around Colorado routinely cost more than $700. Instructors earn a small fraction of that. Skilled, dedicated labor in a field awash with money deserve better than to struggle to earn a living.