Author: Benjamin

I am grateful for the work I’ve gotten to do with Jerry. I am grateful at how transformative I’ve found our work together to be. I am grateful that I can look at my life before and after and see how much better things are now. I am grateful that my exploration of the TTW principles takes me outside to play. I am grateful for soccer and golf and tennis and mountain biking. I am grateful for skiing and snowboarding. I am grateful to be in a place with great weather and great natural beauty so that I want to be outside every day. I am grateful for having a teacher as adept as Jerry, someone who is inclined to experiment, to play–this is how TTW came to be, this is why it has worked. I am grateful to the clients we have worked with so far. I am grateful for the clients yet to come.

I am grateful that our idea worked, and I am grateful to have learned that change is more complicated than I thought. There is no magic switch here. Our patterns do not just go away. I am grateful to have seen that truth so clearly through this year of exploration. And I am grateful, deeply grateful, that change is possible.

Change is always possible.

I am grateful that today I am in a beautiful place among mountains, far away from all the noise. It’s quiet here, and the mountains embrace me.

I am grateful for the warm smells of cooking. I am grateful for the food we’ll get to consume. I am grateful for the traditions embodied in the meal, a thread running back through my entire life and into a time before I was. Today is a pause for prayer, that we are not discrete and disconnected from All That Is, but somehow something of us existed before we were born, and will ever endure.

I am grateful that today I’m with people I love. And I’m grateful for all the people I love, everywhere they are. May all of you–may all people everywhere–find peace and joy on this day.

This year I do not get to be grateful for how smoothly things are going. I do not get to be grateful for the feeling of flow. I do not get to be grateful for ease. Late summer clenched the air until mid-November, refusing to let go. Even the snow struggled to come. The world trembles. You can feel it.

But if you get still and comfortable and open up your center and breathe, you can be aware that behind and within it all, there is still the open, flowing breath, and a warm, abiding stillness.

Welcome, it says.

I am grateful for the breath and I am grateful for the stillness.

When it comes to my work, it is never as easy in real life as it is in my head. This truth causes me great struggle and frustration. And, honestly, I avoid dealing with it a lot of the time. The fly on the wall would see me losing myself in noise on the internet. The fly on the wall would see me playing a lot of video games.

It’s never as easy in real life as it seems it should be in my head. But I am grateful for this, because it tells me that my thoughts are not reality.

In writing I am an eternal optimist–right up until I come to the keyboard or notebook and actually start to work. In many other things, I often am a pessimist. It is going to be really bad, I might say. Maybe it is. Maybe not. But my thoughts are not reality.

This week’s pieces are dedicated to my friend Antonia.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have found that I can now approach what happened with the election with gratitude. Had the results been reversed, and had the side I preferred won, it would have been simple to maintain the illusion the everything is okay, that the system is working, that the problem is the other side, my side is correct and righteous and those people are assholes.

But that’s not true. The system is not working. The problem is not the other side. The problem is all of us, in the way in which we’re all contributing to the decline of civility, the dehumanization of those who don’t agree with us. Conflict of a harsher and harsher nature is becoming more and more the norm in our society, and the path to changing it will not be found in practicing more of the same. Winning the election wouldn’t have been a win. We’d all still have lost, because our system is now guaranteeing that we all lose.

I don’t want to live in a society in which everyone loses. I want to see that aspect change. So I am grateful for this experience, because it’s given me–demanded of me–this perspective.

Jerry’s piece this week took me by surprise. We both took the election really hard, but Jerry is usually so grounded that I expected his shock would wear off over the weekend, and he’d return to something like normalcy. So I was certainly surprised by the continued note of despondency in his piece.

As the days go on, however, I’m becoming more and more aware that there is not and will not be a return to normalcy, not as we knew it, on this side of this election. The political divisions between red and blue have been getting sharper for years, but this election was so divisive, and the sense of recrimination, disgust and betrayal so deep, that our society seems to have split asunder.

We have been talking here about how the purpose of TTW is not primarily to make ourselves or our clients into better athletes. That’s just a side effect. Rather, we’re engaging in concrete, embodied practices with the goal of becoming better people.

So now the universe has seen fit to give us a new playing field–one with the highest of stakes–to really test the TTW principles. What does “better people” mean in a divided nation? What does “better people” mean in a country in which the legitimacy of our governmental system is breaking to pieces before our eyes?

If TTW is more than just talk–and it is–then here is where the rubber hits the road. It may look like we’re trying to be better golfers, or tennis players, or whatever. But by practicing being in the present moment, not fleeing from what is, we become more skillful at living in this challenging world.

Related to the observation that in America we’re now so politically polarized that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum can’t even communicate with one another:

There has to be a way to break through, right? There has to be, or things are going to get real, real, real ugly in this country real, real, real soon.

I have been exploring the whaaaaaacky! notion that maybe I could use my skills as a writer to–check this out–actually make a living writing. As I search for jobs like copywriting, one of the things I have been saying to myself and to anyone who’ll listen is that I’ve practiced enough now that, if you give me a few examples to model after, I can write pretty much anything.

I don’t mean that to sound cocky. I’m just saying I’ve put my hours in.

Anyway, in the midst of the turmoil around the election and the rapid dissolution of a safe and functioning society, some brash, contentious part of me found voice and said, “Oh yeah? In that case, write something that expresses your political views while being something that someone on the other side of the political spectrum would actually listen to.”

Who am I?

You’ll forgive me if I am unable to answer that yet.

I’ve been exploring the question in my writing. I went into my recent drafting thinking that I had the answer, but as often happens, I discovered through the process itself that I didn’t really know. It is wonderful that the writing can be the path to discovering the knowing. Such can be the power of writing. But it makes it hard sometimes to figure out how to put together something that feels like, you know, an actual piece.

A part of me died when Donald Trump got elected. Sorry if that sounds melodramatic; I don’t mean it that way. I don’t mean that it was murdered. I don’t mean that it was a terrible thing that it died. It was ready to die, I think, and the election gave it permission to do so.

What died was the part of me holding on to the illusion that our system and our society are working.

That part of me might have survived had Hillary Clinton won the election. I could have relished the feeling of my side winning and used it to feed my complacency. But our system isn’t working. Our society is dissolving in hatred, caustic as acid.

Whenever something to which we are energetically connected dies, it leaves behind an empty place. We feel that emptiness, that hole, first as a shock and then (optimally) as grief, and certainly I have had to grieve its loss, because the death of that part of me renders untenable any choice to remain on the the path I was on. I am now facing a critical question: Without that part of me, who am I?