Author: Benjamin

It’s an exciting time in my work. I am developing new techniques and watching their utility grow. I am exploring new ideas for organizing my ideas.

And behind it all I see a vision, once blurry, coming more and more into focus. One day (soon?), I will say to myself, “Ah yes, I see now: this is what I am doing. This is what I am doing and this is how I am going to explain it to people.”

So far I haven’t gotten there. It’s still vague, blurry, coming out of the mists on the trail ahead. But every day I take some steps forward, and its colors and its contours get clearer.

A couple of weeks ago I published my 500th piece on Free Refills. Pretty cool. Also cool: it happened and I didn’t even realize it. It was just one more piece until a few days later when I was looking at the whole list of published pieces and was like, “Hey, look at that.” So let’s pause a moment for high-fives. Great job, team!

So. A delightfully round number of published pieces to serve as an important milestone: check. Regular assertions that what I’m doing here is Not a Blog: check. And yet I continue to present my material in quintessentially blog-like reverse chronology, as though I actually believe that the reader’s relationship with the writing should be measured by a given piece’s proximity to the present day. (I do have a handful of categories in the categories menu, but I rarely do much with them.)

500 pieces. Instead of apologizing for any perceived failing or making any promises about what I’m going to do with what I’ve written, I’m going to note how much creative energy exists in 500 completed pieces. I’m going to imagine and expect that there is great energy to be found in the juxtaposition and exploration of those pieces. And I’m going to smile, and I’m going to take a full, centered breath, and in doing so I will further open myself to the energy that’s driven and continues to drive all that I’ve done and all that I’m doing.

It was the first Saturday of January and my first day teaching a multi-week kids’ class. I usually coach adults, and while I’ve taught kids before, I’ve never had a class with eight kids in it. Trying to figure out how to keep eight nine-year-olds safe on an extremely busy day on the mountain while simultaneously attempting to actually teach them something felt pretty overwhelming.

I was riding the chairlift with the three of the boys, and we were getting to know each other. The conversation veered as conversations do, especially with kids, and I was jarred from my anxiety by the following exchange:

“Some people think that pink is a girl’s color, but I don’t think so,” said the first boy.

“Yeah, I really like pink,” agreed the second boy.

“It’s not a girl’s color at all,” said the first boy.

“Purple too,” chimed in the third boy.

“Pink and purple are like my favorite colors,” said the first boy.

There are moments when kids reveal something of themselves and you suddenly see clearly an aspect of the adult they’ll someday become. A thread stretching forward into the future.

And there are moments, too, when there’s no such clarity to the revelation. You recognize the significance of the moment without being able to know what it signifies. In these moments, you witness uniqueness, potential, and the ever-moving-forward. The change that is inherent in all things.

Our society is struggling through challenging times, and as I got to know these kids I witnessed a sensitivity to the world they’re living in, far beyond their intellectual and emotional capacity to process. “Make America Great Again,” said the man on TV. These children are growing up in a world deeply in flux, surrounded on all sides by the deep fear that things are changing for the worse. (You should have seen how off-kilter the group was the weekend of the inauguration.)

So picture: three nine-year-old boys riding the chairlift together (in the presence of an adult authority figure, no less), all professing a love for pink and purple, an awareness of the broader social significance of that opinion, and a defiance of the norms they see imposed on them.

In that moment as they delight you with their very is-ness, how can you help but see a reason to hope and the potential for magic?

One of the key understandings that arises as you practice becoming more centered, grounded and energy aware is that our separation from the world around us, our sense of an existence discrete from our environment and each other, is an illusion. This is as observable a reality as that grass is green, the sky is blue, and water is wet. For some reason, one of the key traits of modernity is that we’ve suppressed our sensitivity to this reality. It’s no more something I can prove to you rhetorically than I can prove that fire is hot. But breathe and center: soon enough, this truth will reveal itself. You’ll find yourself stunned that you ever experienced things any other way.

Our political system has divided into two camps: Us, and Them. Consider: On Wednesday, Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General on a vote that saw exactly one senator, a Democrat, break from the party line. On Tuesday, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education on a vote in which she was opposed by every Democrat and exactly two Republicans. Flip the party of the president around: During the Obama administration, on issue after issue, Republicans were unified in their opposition.

Does this strike you as natural? Or does it seem more likely that we’ve come to determine our beliefs not by thinking but by through our identities as Democrats or Republicans?

Imagine, instead, if we approached issues from a sense of flow, a sense of ground. I’m not suggesting that we’d all agree on everything–our differing backgrounds would still lead us to think in different ways. But by finding our way to our answers through our own bodies, we’d overcome this unthinking, unfeeling tribalism that passes for political awareness.

The symptoms of this tribalism are all too obvious. The mutual antipathy on display corrodes all discourse. Indeed, it has become the dominant feature of our current system.

And how well is our system actually working? Are we getting things done? No, we are not. We are not capable of doing anything productive, only destructive. Republicans spent the last seven-and-a-half years screaming about Obamacare, promising they’d repeal it right away–but you notice how little forward movement on that front they’ve actually managed, because, while Republicans are unified in their opposition, they have no creative ideas, no ideas for something better.

These are the manifestations of the energetic blockages at the core of our present political system.

Change the world is a side effect of any sufficiently good idea.

I look at the world and I see a lot of problems. You do as well, right? But I also look at the world and see everything we’ve accomplished as a species, despite pretty much just stumbling along, and I have to marvel at our power. We are capable of so much. I look at it all and I believe in my heart that there is little besides a stubborn unwillingness to change that keeps us from solving our problems.

A relatively recent development is the creation of a tool that makes it possible to communicate with almost anyone almost anywhere in the world for close to no cost. By all appearances, this tool is a game-changer. Perhaps you’re aware of it.

It’s a game-changer because the reach of a good idea has never been greater. The technological barriers that in the past would have prevented or at least slowed the rapid spread of a good idea are gone.

Because every good idea changes the world for the better, one of the missions of Free Refills is to encourage people to have good ideas and to communicate them. My purview is necessarily limited, because I am only one person. I, like everyone, am demarcated by my own interests and values. There are problems I don’t even realize are problems. But there are things you know about that I never will. So have ideas. Tell them to me, and to everyone.

It’s not my place to fix the world. It’s everyone’s place.

We can do this.

Regarding The Free Refills Mission, Revisited:

On further consideration, I’m not sure that the Free Refills mission was ever “change the world.” “Change the world” is just a side-effect.

Granted, “change the world” is a side-effect of any sufficiently good idea.

Moral of the story: Have good ideas. Pursue them.

Regarding the piece Australian Open Writing Preview from a week ago:

About my idea to try to tell the Federer-Nadal match as a story, I said, “I don’t know if I can do it. It may not work.” One morning this weekend, I exclaimed to myself, “What the hell is wrong with me? The setup alone–Federer going for his 18th Slam, Nadal is 15th; neither man, much less both, expected to be in the final–was an incredible story. Then Federer and Nadal gave us the gift of a back-and-forth five-setter. I mean, how much drama do you need before there’s a story?” Of course it can work.

And regarding the question of whether or not I can do it: that’s bullshit too. Can I do it? Answer: write the damn thing. Granted, it may not be excellent, because I’ve never done such a thing before.
And if that’s the case, then the answer is simple: more practice.

Look: my trip to the U.S. Open last August was a fucking blast. I want to be someone who regularly travels to tennis tournaments. The best way to make sure I can afford to do so is to get paid to write about them. And the best way to get to paid to write about them is to prove that I can write something sufficiently compelling that people will want to read it.

The only way I’ve found to get really good at a certain type of writing is to write. So…

…is not a piece I’ll be writing.

It’s not that I’d have to overcome my silly tendency to want to see the game as somehow symbolic of … something, rather than simply as a football game. (And symbolic of what, exactly? Do I connect the Patriots with reliably blue New England and the Falcons with the reliably red South, and then see the Patriot’s improbable come-from-behind victory as some kind of political omen? But then what happens when I remember that the Patriots are goddamn serial cheaters and I hate them?)

It’s not that I couldn’t find a way to see the game divorced from the greater currents of social energy that surround it. (Though those currents sure were forcefully, unavoidably on display, weren’t they? Did you notice how every commercial either spoke of the power and goodness of multicultural unity or else sought the safe refuge of pure absurdism? How avowedly political Lady Gaga began her halftime performance with a totally non-ironic mash-up of “God Bless America,” “This Land Is Your Land” and the Pledge of Allegiance? Watching the game within its televised context and extrapolating from there, you might be forced to conclude that here was a society in turmoil, if not actual crisis.)

And it’s certainly not that there weren’t a thousand fascinating examples of flow of energy during the game.

It’s that a proper TTW analysis of the Super Bowl would involve actively empathizing with the Falcons, and I’m just not going to do it. There’s enough going on in my world as it is. Whatever the Falcons players are feeling right now, they’re gonna have to suffer through it without my participation.

I want to be clear about what I’m doing with these pieces. Our society is collapsing in conflict. Therefore it is important to me to do my best to write in such a way that someone who disagrees with me politically will at least listen, and perhaps even will take what I have to say into consideration. I freely admit that my political views are well to the left of the political mainstream in this country. Still, I’m doing my best to speak in the least partisan way that I am able, guided by a perspective in which I have a certain expertise, namely that of energy flow within a system. I have opinions about what to do about climate change, and immigration, and our tax system, and so on, opinions with which you may or may not agree. But our problem is not that we lack opinions, or that mine are right and yours are wrong or vice versa. Our problems run much deeper than that. So today I’d like to outline a series of observations that will guide my writing and my actions going forward.

Observation 1: Our political system is blocked on a fundamental, energetic level.

Observation 2: We’re past the point where this blockage can be ignored or worked around. We’re also past the point where this blockage can be easily fixed.

Observation 3: A clear manifestation of this blockage is that our system is no longer capable of bringing about outcomes that are for the good of the majority of Americans. More accurately and more strongly: only a small minority of Americans are benefiting from the system as it is operating now.

Observation 4: There’s a growing awareness that something is deeply amiss, that the problems run deeper than just who’s currently in office.

Observation 5: Hyper-partisanship is not just making things worse, it is leading inexorably to the collapse of the current system.

Observation 6: 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 flow of energy.

In coming weeks I will explore all of these observations in greater depth.