Author: Benjamin

Among the many things in that moment that shock me, perhaps the biggest is the realization that considerable time has passed–often many days or even weeks–since I last was truly alive. I thought I was alive, but it turns out I have only been going through the motions. Alive is more than just not being dead.

This phenomenon, of suddenly recognizing that, yes, I am in fact alive, has been occurring with increasing frequency.

Sometimes a situation arises such that, for whatever reason, I’ll be forced to pause in the light of a dawning awareness. I suddenly become deeply cognizant, in a way I wasn’t a moment before, that I’m alive. This is not pretend. All of this stuff is actually happening.

In my piece from a couple of weeks ago, I said something that, on further reflection, I felt to be mistaken. I wrote about the shift from a sense of shared social identity a few generations ago to the radical polarization we’re experiencing now, and said:

The shift happened naturally enough. It results from tendencies within us that aren’t even something to especially decry. One of the core tenets of TTW is the cultivation of a state of ease in all things that we do, and from that perspective it’s clear why people would choose to consume media produced by people who share a similar worldview: it’s far more comfortable. Who wants to choose the discomfort of constantly experiencing the dissonance of dealing with people whose worldview does not match your own? Instead, at our current level of energetic development, we seek the comfortable consonance of “This affirms what I already think.”

As I thought about it later, I realized that I was confusing the state of ease we seek to cultivate through TTW practices like centering with that which is simply easy. They aren’t the same thing.

Easy often means a path of minimal resistance, usually relying on habit. Indeed, if there’s anything I have learned through the going-on-three years I’ve worked with Jerry, it’s that the easiest thing in the world is to stay embedded in your current habits and not change, no matter how strong the impetus. That is, in a sense, what habits are: a state requiring little or no energetic input to keep up. They are easy. This is the benefit, and the curse, of habits.

Ease, from a TTW perspective, is a different thing entirely. When you practice centering and cultivate the state of flow it engenders, blocks to that flow reveal themselves. If, for example, your habit in times of stress is to tense up, tensing up is the easy thing to do, but it’s the very opposite of ease. Ease will result when you become aware of that tension and use a state of consciousness and flow to release it.

If we bring this concept back to the political realm, then we see that the current polarization of our discourse, driven by habitual patterns of thought and behavior, is extremely easy, but it is far, far from a state of ease. Indeed, we’re watching our system become more and more toxic, and no one seems to have slightest idea what to do about it. As I write this, the Senate is debating invoking the so-called “nuclear option” with respect to the confirmation of Supreme Court justices. Really consider what the analogy is there. We’re likening this shift to the decision to go to nuclear war. You tell me: energetically, is this going to invoke creative energy (ease), or destructive?

I’ve written off our government at this point. The toxicity runs so deep that the government is already in a state of collapse, and that collapse is accelerating. But I have been trying to imagine what a state of ease seeking to counter these destructive patterns might look like. I have started envisioning something like this: going up to someone whose political views differ completely from my own and shaking hands–a gesture of peace and respect–and then saying, “I don’t understand your point of view. Can you explain it to me?”

1. Because I love the sport. I love the way the tour unfolds over the course of the year. I love the different surfaces, and how much they matter. I love that in many tournaments the women play on the same stage as the men. I love watching it and I love playing it. I love its beauty, the patterns of movement and the way points develop and the myriad angles and spins and touches.

2. It has replaced soccer as my sports obsession, both as viewer and participant. It has seized my attention and my imagination. I am fascinated by it.

3. Someone has to be the best English-language tennis writer in the world. David Foster Wallace is dead, Brian Phillips works for MTV News for some reason, and the realities of the journalistic forms they work in hamstring the rest. So there’s a void.

You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself with these things, but it’s kind of hard not to. You look at what Roger Federer has accomplished so far this year, and you start thinking, “We might be seeing the start of one of the most remarkable seasons tennis has ever seen.”

Federer has clearly been the top player on tour so far this year. At this level of play, he has a serious shot at winning multiple Majors, and it’s not outlandish to think that he might regain the number one ranking sometime during the year. He’s 35, four or more years older than his most serious rivals. Already, it’s been an amazing season.

And really, it’s genuinely stunning to think that at 35, Federer, already one of the greatest attacking players of all time, has somehow managed to elevate his attacking play still further. He’s serving lights out: apparently his aces per match is the highest it’s ever been, suggesting that his serve placement and disguise have somehow improved. (Given where he was already, how is that even possible?) And the much-discussed improvement of his backhand–taking the ball on the rise and attacking as constantly as he is able–has turned what was his weakness into a weapon. Everyone else on tour should be very afraid.

It’s easy to say that Federer’s success results in part from the decline of Murray and Djokovic, but while there’s truth to that, it’s not really very insightful. You can always find a counterfactual to diminish what’s happening in the moment. You could say of Djokovic’s brilliant 2015 season, “Sure, he was great, but Federer is so much older than him. If they were the same age, Federer would have been winning.” Okay, fine. And if Djokovic had chosen to play the 2015 Wimbledon final with his left hand, he’d have lost. Is that in any way a useful perspective? So Murray’s elbow may have been bothering him in Melbourne, where he lost in the round of 16 against Mischa Zverev, and it may have been bothering him at Indian Wells, where he lost in the second round against Pospisil. Maybe Djokovic lost in the second round in Melbourne to Istomin and got his ass handed to him at Indian Wells by Kyrgios because of sunspots. Who knows? Maybe if only I’d had better coaching, I’d be world number one right now. How far down the counterfactual rabbit-hole do you want to go?

That life unfolds with unexpected vagaries is just the way it is. Injuries happen. Burn out happens. Should we put an asterisk by Djokovic’s name in winning the French last year because Nadal had to pull out with a wrist injury? Does Murray get only half-credit for his 2016 Wimbledon win since it’s now clear that Federer wasn’t 100% after his post-Melbourne knee surgery?

I think we have to say no. It’s likely that Djokovic’s current malaise stems in part from bounce-back from the relentless intensity with which we pursued his goals in 2015 and the first half of 2016. It’s likely that Andy Murray’s decline since he took over the number one ranking, and the injury he’s dealing with now, stems from just how many matches he had to play last year. There is a cost to the body to play at the level of intensity professional tennis demands. That both Federer and Nadal are at the top of the game right now after six-month injury lay-offs is no more of a coincidence than that Murray and Djokovic have fallen off. All of that is the nature of the sport. (Any sport, really.) There are costs to actions. When you pour all your energy into winning one tournament, you may find your gas tank empty for the next one.

So any qualifiers you place on the success Federer has experienced so far this season are beside the point. It’s true that both Djokovic and Murray lost early at Melbourne. But for Federer to win the tournament, he still had to defeat Berdych, Nishikori, Wawrinka, and Nadal. At Indian Wells he had to beat Nadal and Wawrinka. At Miami he barely beat Berdych, played what will be viewed as one of the matches of the year in the semis against Kyrgios, and defeated Nadal in the final. No one has handed him anything.

Which means that I’m going to double down on the thesis of this little essay, that so far we are seeing what might be one of the great seasons in tennis history. Should Federer manage to win another Major this year, or regain, even for a week, the number one ranking, what we’ll be seeing from him will be as remarkable as anything we’ve ever seen in the sport. People have been writing him off as too old for several years now. That claim already didn’t match the evidence–his 2015 season was amazing, but unfortunately he ran into the Djokovic buzzsaw that year–but here we are, watching him at an age when most players are supposed to have already retired, and he is still, somehow, finding ways to elevate his game.

If the sport grabs your interest at all, it’s time to clear your calendar for Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and the summer hard court season. There’s a lot of tennis to come and many many things can still change. But even the possibility that we’re seeing the kind of season that people will talk about for years to come should keep you tuning in as the season progresses.

Somewhere around 3-3 or 4-3 in the first set (Federer having served first), I said aloud that I thought Nadal was going to win the match. It had been a physical match, Federer was struggling with his first serve, Nadal had had break-point chances in two of Federer’s service games already, and the heavy humidity was keeping the ball slow. And then suddenly Federer broke for 5-3 and quickly served out the set. From there he did just what we’d see him do against Nadal in Australia and at Indian Wells, just turn the pressure up and up and up, attack more and more and more, until finally Nadal broke against the relentless barrage.

To his credit, Nadal did change his tactics somewhat from what we saw at Indian Wells, which was wise given the completeness of the beat-down he suffered there. He brought a bit more firepower and variety to his serve, stood deeper on the service return to give himself a bit more time, and sometimes attacked the Federer forehand instead of just relentlessly attacking the backhand.

Unfortunately for him, on this particular day, the imprecision on the forehand side that Federer displayed during the final in Melbourne was completely absent. Federer is widely considered to have the best forehand of all time, and on this day he demonstrated it.

Ultimately, that seems to force Rafa (and everyone else) into a bit of a conundrum. If the improvements Federer has brought to the backhand mean you can no longer attack the backhand, and he’s got the forehand dialed in, meaning you can’t attack the forehand, what exactly does that leave you? Harsh language?

As we’ve seen so far this year, the answer appears to be little to nothing. Federer’s loss in Dubai was a strange blip; other than that, all he has done is win the Australian and both early-season Masters 1000 titles. Pretty impressive.

You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself with these things, but it’s kind of hard not to. Coming off of last year’s injury-abbreviated season, Federer’s season thus far has already been remarkable. But I (and ten zillion other tennis fans) find ourselves wondering: are we witnessing a season for the ages?

Written before Sunday’s final

Do you remember that scene in The Matrix in which Neo is getting trained in martial arts (if that’s what you call having skills downloaded directly into his brain), and Morpheus is testing him by sparring against him, and Mouse runs to where everyone else is hanging out and exclaims, “Morpheus is fighting Neo!” and everyone immediately rushes to the monitors to watch? Watching this match felt a lot like that, like you wanted to rush into another room and exclaim, “Kyrgios is playing Federer!”

They both do things with the ball that no one should be able to do, totally Matrix-like things. Federer wraps imagination together with grace so perfectly that his play almost always seems effortless. Kyrgios couples imagination with raw power, playfulness, and a lot of flash to lead to a game full of stunning surprises, like the Federer drop half-volley he answered by rushing up and hitting a forward-facing tweener for a winner.

They fought, and fought, and fought. Federer saved two set points to win the first set. Kyrgios saved two match points to win the second set. Federer fought back from a mini-break in the third-set tiebreaker. Ultimately, someone had to win, because the rules demand it, but on this night the difference between them was but a hair’s breadth.

Nadal will have to bring a very different strategy to the final from what he brought to his match against Federer at Indian Wells, or else the real final will have been played Friday night, not Sunday afternoon.

Observation 7: To solve the overarching problem, we’re going to have to create a new way of engaging with each other both politically and personally. That means building on an understanding grounded in the flow of energy.

The foundation for creating a new way of engaging with each other begins with creating a new way of engaging with ourselves.

A general numbness to our lived experience is endemic among Americans. The evidence is so ubiquitous and so constant that it can be a challenge to even see it, because seeing it suggests that it could be different. One simple example: the proliferation of evidence that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. What do you think drives the appeal of constant, insidious distraction?

We choose distraction because actually getting present to what’s happening in the moment feels more and more fraught, more and more dangerous. Conveniently, technology allows us to escape the present more and more effectively. Why be here, now in this moment, when there are so many easy and entertaining ways to be anywhere else?

What’s more: numbness is a functional way (of sorts) of getting through life. Numbness creates a certain stability, and most people get along fine(-ish) just stumbling numbly through life. (If it were otherwise, breakdown would be a far more common experience than it is.) Furthermore, if you’ve practiced numbness for long enough, the idea that it could be otherwise seems foreign, utterly disconnected from your own experience: This is just who I am. Isn’t it?

Except: A life lived in numbness obviates the possibility of truly thriving in your life. Something will feel unsatisfactory. You’ll find yourself struggling to earn money, or you’ll find yourself struggling to stay healthy, or you’ll find yourself struggling to find work that matters to you, or you’ll just simply find yourself unhappy and be unable to explain exactly why. Whatever the problem is, you’ll experience it as a persistent knocking, right at the threshold of liminality. You’ll probably do your best to ignore it.

A lack of thriving is so built into our society and our system that it’s simply seen as the way things are. It seems like crystal-gazing hippie-speak to suggest that it could be otherwise, much less that thriving could be as simple as making a choice to thrive and from there committing to a series of actions, all of which are available to literally anyone and entirely under your own control.

Well, nothing shatters the smooth, shiny veneer of complacency like crisis. In the early drafts for this piece, I wrote that crisis is coming. But that’s wrong. Crisis is already here.

Crisis is what explains Donald Trump. Out of crisis come opportunities for demagogues and hideous men, people who offer facile answers and the anodyne promise that the problem is wholly outside of you. They offer the sweet lullaby-like promise of victimhood. Someone somewhere did this to you.

The thrust toward populist demagoguery succeeds because it offers change without any demands on its supporters. It is the last gasp claim that the system is fixable, that the difference between functioning and not functioning depends on who is in charge.

Ultimately, this thrust will fail. It will fail because it is a lie. The problem is not outside of you. You are the problem. So am I.

So when this thrust blows itself out–as it must, because it is false–and when the damage it causes ultimately brings everything to a standstill–and it will–then finally our illusions will be seen for what they are. We’ll be forced to ask, “Now what?” What does one do from a bottom?

Here I speak from my own experience. The only thing that I’ve found that brought any lasting change was to learn to get very, very intimate with the present moment. From a close attention to the present moment, deeper truths begin to emerge. If you follow the truth for long enough, then … well, then what?

Imagine what happens when you let go of constant, numb struggle and discover that you are finally–finally!–beginning to thrive.

Still in the midst of my little breather, I’ve been hunting around my brain, trying to find something simple to write today. Maybe a hot-take about the president? Kinda feels like it’s been done. Maybe a hot-take about the term hot-take and how it’s gone from inside-baseball journalist-speak to a term you hear mentioned all over the place, which usage flatters the audience into thinking they’re totally in-the-know, which thereby might be contributing to the general diminishment of any sense that there’s any kind of authority behind the mastheads of our various news sources? Hmmm, seems like I kinda just did.

I tried texting with Ima Radster to see if he had any ideas, but all he ever responded with was, “YO WHATTUP G-MONEY,” which didn’t really help.

So I therefore declare myself bereft of ideas.

Look: You try to keep it simple. But do you really want to revert to little self-referential in-jokes, just enough to amuse yourself a little and call them a piece and sign off for the day?

Well, you say, if I must.