Author: Benjamin

(From TTW) I Choose to Be Here

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about my experience with our first round of golf, saying that it wasn’t fun, and that it won’t be fun until I can unlock the power of my swing.

Now, first of all, I want to say that there is value in knowing yourself. If a certain something isn’t going to be satisfying, it isn’t going to be satisfying, and you do whatever you need to do to deal with that. If playing rounds at my current level of ability isn’t fun, I can certainly wait until I get better at hitting the ball.

But I have been thinking a lot about the experience, and I think I’ve been operating under a problematic misapprehension, and it’s not something I want to continue.

The problem wasn’t the situation. Being able to reliably drive the ball 200 yards–or 225, or 250–isn’t going to fix anything. My dissatisfaction wasn’t inherent in the experience. My dissatisfaction was, essentially, a choice.

If I really want to, I can hold on to the idea that golf is going to be fun when X, Y or Z finally happens. I can hold on to the idea that in this journey there’s a destination. But there is no destination. There’s only ever the present moment, constantly unfolding. Everything else is memories and dreams. So I can keep waiting for some magical future where everything is perfect, or else I can meet the present moment as it unfolds around me. And will I always enjoy the process? That doesn’t seem to match my experience. Sometimes things feel good and sometimes they do not, but feelings pass just like all other things pass in the everchanging present. I can fight with What Is in the present moment, measuring it up against a dream, or I can attend deeply to it. I can choose to be here, or not.

I choose to be here.

Identity (II)

In our conversation about setting down things that are heavy, I asked Jerry about my writing, because these days sometimes my writing, particularly my rule about daily publishing, feels like a burden. He said, “You’re a teacher now. Do whatever you need to do to support your teaching.”

I am a teacher? Present tense?

Jerry said, “You’ve taught me (and others) writing. You’ve taught skiing. You’re teaching centering. And you’re called to teach. You’re a teacher.”

Okay, then. I’m a teacher.

Identity

So I noticed this thing that keeps happening. It’s happened a number of times in the tennis groups I play with, and it happened when I was watching a match at the U.S. Open. People keep asking me if I’m a coach. Until recently, my answer was no. I had this idea about what they meant by coach–someone who coaches a team, maybe at a high school. I’m not that.

But after enough people ask you something like that enough times, doesn’t it begin to look like maybe they’re reflecting back to you some truth about yourself? After all, no one’s asking me if I’m a surgeon.

So yes. I’m a coach.

On Burdens, and the Lightening of Burdens

Yesterday, Jerry and I were talking about how centering practices can call on us to do deep emotional work, and I called that work heavy. Jerry objected to the energetic connotations of that word. I could see energy flowing through him as he channeled what needed to be said. Not heavy, he said. What you are carrying is heavy. How would it feel to set it down?

Social Customs Among the Moneyed Class in New York City: A Case Study

According to the dissertation research of social anthropologist Caspian Ancién (University of Cambridge, 2013), the hideous practice of bottle service first emerged in New York City. For those of you still fortunate enough to remain blissfully unaware of this travesty, bottle service refers to getting a table in a posh dance club and, instead of having the competent bartenders who work there make you delicious cocktails with top-shelf ingredients, as is their job, getting served a bottle of crap vodka and a selection of low-grade mixers so that you can make for yourself and your party the same crappy screwdrivers and greyhounds you made in college, only now at a two-thousand-percent markup. Bottle service was sold as the height of luxe sophistication; idiot stockbrokers with too much money jumped at the chance for a new, ever-more-moronic form of conspicuous consumption; and soon enough the idea swept the whole country. These days, there are actual clubs in Las Vegas where you simply aren’t allowed to sit down–not at all, not anywhere–unless you’ve purchased bottle service. If you’re a woman and your date isn’t willing to spend $450 on a bottle of Absolut, you better be ready to stand to pee.

On this trip to New York, I was horrified to see that a similar idea has made its way to the restaurants. They call it platter service. Now, instead of having well-trained, gifted, experienced chefs actually cook for you, you can spend a few hundred dollars on a platter of cold cuts, Wonder Bread and mayonnaise and make sandwiches for your whole party. At a small bistro not far from Central Park, I peered at the table behind the velvet rope, where a hedge-fund manager in a $7000 bespoke suit prepared bologna-and-american-cheese sandwiches for the three leggy supermodels competing for his attention. One of the women caught me looking, glanced at the immaculately prepared wasabi-crusted New York strip steak and flash-roasted vegetables on the plate in front of me, and rolled her eyes.

(From TTW) More Thoughts on Not Having Fun

In last week’s piece, I wrote about how the recent round Jerry and I played wasn’t fun for me. So does that mean that I’m done? I quit? I don’t have what it takes to play golf to just simply have a good time, and so I’m going to let it go?

Of course not. Because now the interesting work can really begin. In acknowledging the aspect of the game that matters most to me–namely, unlocking the power of my swing–I know where to put the heart of my practice. This focus may not make an immediate positive difference in terms of score (indeed, if my accuracy declines during the initial part of the process, I could well end up with higher scores), but I know my satisfaction will markedly increase.

However, it wasn’t merely my dissatisfaction with the length of my shots that kept the round from being fun for me. Other things came up both before and during the round that told me a lot about myself and my relationship to the sport.

First of all, I was careless with my time leading up to the round, trying to get too many things done that morning, which put me in a state of frustration before I ever even left the house. When I get into time-stress, my energy tends to blow up, and it takes a long time to settle down again, during which time it affects my ability to be present and enjoy what’s going on around me. Allowing that to happen right before the round certainly had negative repercussions on my enjoyment of the round.

But if I’m being honest, long before that happened, I was already primed for a perilous emotional state.

Jerry and I have spoken multiple times in these pieces about how the process of living a more centered life will get energy flowing through places where you’ve previously shut down. We start to feel places we’ve numbed.

Well, that morning before the round, I found myself in the midst of some of the feelings I used to have about playing golf back when I’d last played regularly, when I was a kid in middle school. They weren’t simple feelings. The feelings related to my frustration with the game, to memories of my displeasure at awakening so early to play (my dad always wanted to be on the course as close to sunrise as possible, and there is no great joy being awakened at 5:30 in the morning when you’re twelve or thirteen years old–thankfully Jerry and I met at a far more sensible time, but those feelings nevertheless arose), and feeling related to my dad himself.

My dad had about as literal a love-hate relationship with golf as it’s possible to have. He went religiously, week after week, but he struggled and struggled with the sport. His explosive temper and the endless frustration golf caused him made for kind of a bad combination. And of course I had my own relationship to his anger, as well as my own propensity toward anger, and a conscious desire to not want to emulate his volatility. Golf had all of these associations for me when I was a kid, and on that Friday morning before I went to play, I watched them all arise again in my body.

So what do you do about that kind of thing? Because I am neither interested in playing out my father’s pathologies around the game, nor am I interested in reliving feelings that have lingered in my body since my boyhood.

Well, interested or not, there is no easy path through it. Things arise. And when they do, we generally have two choices: we can try to deny the feelings are there, either by trying to ignore them or tamp them down; or we can acknowledge the feelings and then center and breathe through them. Through that process, fresh energy will flow through the stuck places, and the stagnant energy will start to release.

(Now, whether or not dealing with these feelings when they arise during a round is productive is a different matter. It may not be appropriate to close your eyes and center deeply and breathe for a while until the feelings dissipate when you’re in the middle of a round and the people behind you wish you’d just go ahead and hit your next goddamn shot already.)

This may not be immediately obvious, but it’s a good thing when feelings like these arise. As Jerry and I have said several times in these writings, our main goal with this project is not to improve our golf games, but to improve ourselves as people. We seek to improve our lives. In acknowledging these feelings, I have an amazing opportunity to grow. The process won’t be easy or comfortable. Changing challenging feelings never is. Even writing about it is challenging. Still, I recognize how significant the long-term benefits are going to be, and so I welcome the process of change.

On the Craft Beer Scene in New York City

Microbrewing has finally come to New York, and while it’s certainly improved the quality of beers available around town, their beer scene can’t hold a candle to that of any even medium-sized city in Colorado. You heard me right, New York: You aren’t actually the center of the universe. Go ahead and console yourselves with one of your so-so beers.

Lesser-Known Ethnic Neighborhoods of New York

When you’ve lived in Boulder as many years as I have, this city’s lack of diversity becomes something of which you (optimally) remain intellectually aware, but isn’t something you notice, per se, on any given day. New York is like the reciprocal of that. Pick an ethnicity, race, color of skin–it’s not just that people of that category are present, not just that they abound, but that there are enough of them that, somewhere in the city, there’s a neighborhood that celebrates their ethnicity. (This is beautiful, of course.)

We’ve all heard of Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy. But there are lesser-known enclaves as well. In south Brooklyn, there’s the Lesser Pyramids, where you can get great Egyptian food and, for the right price, have your departed loved ones mummified. Many consider Staten Island’s España Pequeña a must-see, especially during the summer bullfight season. Memphis II, built around the questionable assertion that west Tennesseans are their own race, features terrific barbecue and an exact replica of Graceland, no more and no less tasteless than the original. The French Quarter is actually in New Orleans, but knowledgeable people know the exact abandoned phone booths that will instantaneously transport you there.

Don’t be fooled into going to Little Tony, though. That’s just what Big Tony calls his fifth-floor Murray Hill walk-up. Big Tony is pretty creepy. He’ll probably try to touch you.

Unknown New York History

Many years ago, prostitutes in New York got tired of the stigma associated with their line of work and declared themselves a separate ethnicity, their occupation no longer either choice or hardship, but an expression of cultural pride. They took as their (let’s call it) homeland an area in the southern part of Manhattan. Embarrassed New Yorkers, trying to sweep this period of the city’s history under the rug, try to tell you it’s because it’s South of Houston, but in truth SoHo is so named because there are So Many Hos.