Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

My name is Benjamin Lanin, but most people call me Ben. I’m a professional writer. I write books and long-form essays, because long-form writing is what I most like to read, but I also write whatever someone is willing to pay me for, because I’m a professional, and I do what it takes to make “professional” true.

I write on a variety of topics. Recently, I’ve written a lot about energy flow in the body, my practices as a writer, and the imbalances that are so clearly afflicting our society. I’ve also written a lot about tennis. I like tennis.

In addition to writing, I also coach (writers and otherwise), specializing in freeing up blocked energy. Over the years, I’ve developed (or stolen) some very specific techniques for dealing with those blocks. If you’re blocked, I can probably help.

What you see here on Free Refills is, substantially, the fruit of my own practice as I’ve learned to deal with and move through blocks.

When I started coaching Jerry on his writing, I taught him zero-drafting, and I gave the particular advice not to sweat the beginning too much. Writing is a body practice, I told him. The simple act of physically beginning to write will move you toward where you need to go. I said, “Just write, ‘You have to begin somewhere, so let’s start here,’ or something, and see what follows.”

When he handed me the first pages of his first zero draft, the first words were, “Let’s start here.” I laughed. Seeing them written out, I was struck by how delightfully inviting they are, and how incantatory as well. They move things forward.

You have to start somewhere.

Let’s start here.

(For a little background on what I mean by fruition, please see my Free Refills from Tuesday and Wednesday.)

Jerry and I started publishing pieces for the Training Tiger Woods project on the autumn equinox of 2015. (Energetically, probably more a Planting-a-Seed action than a Harvesting action, but an auspicious day for beginning nonetheless.) We’ve now published seven seasons of work here.

The project started as a place to explore using energy techniques to speed learning of and to more completely achieve our potentials within the realm of sports. Then, with the election and the massive turmoil that followed, we felt called to write about how to bring those same energy techniques to bear to adapt to and survive and perhaps ultimately begin to change the toxic energy that’s permeating our society.

The pieces I wrote for Tuesday and Wednesday call for a different relationship with our work. It has always been our goal to turn the work we were doing into books, and now is the time to turn our attention fully to that goal. Blogging the exploring and experimenting we’ve done so far has been a useful practice, and that exploring and experimenting will doubtless continue, but the act of preparing and readying a piece for publication once a week is now distracting from steady work that writing a book requires, where it’s best to write without immediate concern for putting something out there. So in order to best bring these works to fruition, we’re going to stop publishing here on any kind of a regular schedule. When something comes up in the writing that requests that we just get it out there, or when something interesting happens in our continued explorations, we’ll publish here. So please check back from time to time.

In the meantime, thank for you reading, and we hope you’ll be interested in our work as it comes to Fruition.

The goal with Free Refills has always been to have enough material here that it would support my goal of earning a full and vibrant living via my writing. But in what way? I’ve never really been able to fully articulate it.

I have long insisted that Free Refills is not a blog. So what is it? Today marks the 600th piece I’ve put up as part of the Free Refills project. I think it’s fair to call Free Refills a portfolio of my work. It is also proof (to myself, and to the world) that I continue to show up: I have earned, and every day continue to earn, the right to call myself a working writer.

Free Refills should give readers sense of what I do, what I’m capable of, and, I hope, a sense of what they’d like to see from me in the future. All 600 pieces I’ve written so far have been written at my own volition. But I would prefer to give my readers what interests them, in exchange for the financial support to continue doing so.

So if spring is the time for Planting, summer the time of Fruition, fall the time of Harvest, and winter the time of Rest and Recuperation, then would I say that over the nine seasons I have practiced the Free Refills project that I have Planted Seeds on each of the spring equinoxes, began to bring things to Fruition on both summer solstices so far, have Harvested each fall equinox, and put everything to Rest and began quietly again each winter? I’ve been aware of those energies, but, really, things have been pretty consistent around here for all nine seasons. I write my 5000 words per week, I publish every weekday. There’s nothing that particularly indicates that anything has changed besides, perhaps, my acknowledgment of the change of seasons.

That I was finally able to put the summer solstice to name, to call it Fruition, brought me to a different idea and understanding of what those seasons might mean. I thought, “Maybe I have been in Planting a Seed this whole time.” It makes sense, after all. In many ways, I’ve been doing the same thing all along, just continuing to work and waiting for clarity regarding exactly I’m doing, hoping that the work itself would guide me. And maybe, with the recognition that summer is a time of Fruition, it finally has. Even though it’s been two-and-a-quarter years of Free Refills so far, this whole period, really, has been about planting seeds. And now it is time for that to change.

If you’ve been a long-time reader of Free Refills, you know that I see each change of seasons as an auspicious time, and that I believe the energy of the seasons can and should guide us in the ways we approach our lives.

Each season has a particular energy to it. Spring is the time for planting, of course, and fall is the time for harvest, and the winter solstice is the day of symbolic death and rebirth, leading into a time of rest, quiet, and recuperation.

However, I have had trouble giving name to the energy of summer. In summer I see fullness, but I was unable to figure out how that should guide me until I attached a new word to the summer solstice and the summer season that follows: fruition. Summer is the time for bringing things to fruition.¹

Happy Summer Solstice. Let us now begin to bring things to fruition.

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¹ Interestingly, I learned this today:

The original meaning of fruition had nothing to do with fruit. Rather, when the term was first used in the early 15th century, it meant only “pleasurable use or possession.” Not until the 19th century did fruition develop a second meaning, “the state of bearing fruit,” possibly as the result of a mistaken assumption that fruition evolved from fruit. The “state of bearing fruit” sense was followed quickly by the figurative application to anything that can be “realized” and metaphorically bear fruit, such as a plan or a project.

Source here.

Obviously I meant fruition in the sense of “state of bearing fruit,” but I like the meaning “pleasurable use” as well.

I watched the Champions League final more out of obligation than any sense of joy, which feels so very weird for me to say. There was a time, way back when, when I wouldn’t miss a Real Madrid match on TV (of course there were far fewer of them back then), and the idea that I’ve stopped caring mightily about the Champions League final feels very very strange indeed. I didn’t even know what sort of injuries Real was dealing with–I thought I remembered that Gareth Bale had missed the round previous–and I knew basically nothing about Juventus except that Gigi Buffon was their goalie.

The thing is, I’m finding it increasingly hard to care about soccer right now. It’s not just that there are too many matches for a spectator to care about. It’s that there are too many matches for the players to stay in top form, and so too much of each season is just a grind. I would ask, “Who has time to watch something like that?” but I guess the answer is many many many people. I mean, I used to be one of them.

Anyway, it turned out to be an enjoyable match. The first half saw well-matched, fluid play, and two goals of utter footballing wizardry. The perfection of Cristiano Ronaldo’s pass to dead-sprinting Dani Carvajal for the first goal makes no sense to me. Surely Carvajal is screaming the whole way, but from what I can tell Ronaldo never once glances in his direction, and yet the pass is inch-perfect. Is bat-like echo-locative hearing also one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s abilities?

And while Mario Madzuckic’s bicycle kick lob goal was also a wonder to behold, it is the build-up play for that goal that blows my mind. Leonardo Bonucci hit a 40-yard diagonal to a streaking Alex Sandro, who volleyed his cross into the middle, where Gonzalo Higuaín chested it down and volley-passed it to Mario Mandzukic, who chested it down and then volley-bicycle-kicked it for the goal. I mean, what can you say about that but holy shit? The damn ball didn’t touch the ground again after Bonucci sent it on its way. Amazing. Mandzuckic’s goal also shows just how incredible the goal sensibility of top players really is, that he can be facing directly away from goal for a substantial period of time and still hit a ball with that kind of accuracy. Yes, there was some luck, but it wasn’t just luck. His sense of where he was in relation to the goal and where Keylor Navas was likely to be in relation to him is simply that well developed.

(I would love to embed a video of the goals I’m speaking of, but I can’t find one. If you have better luck than me, would you post a link in the comments?)

So it was 1-1 at halftime, and looking relatively even. And then the second half happened.

One wonders what halftime in the respective locker rooms looked like. I have to imagine that the Juventus locker room looked like every classic sports film we’ve ever seen (except in Italian). I imagine Massimiliano Allegri congratulating his squad on a well-played first half and exhorting them to greater heights in the second.

Meanwhile, over in the Real Madrid locker room, I imagine Zinedine Zidane standing in utter silence. All the players are looking at him, waiting patiently. The lighting is dim, indirect. No one says anything. It’s cool in there, almost cave-like. And then Zidane says, quietly, “It is now time to show the world what you can do.” And the players all nod their heads silently in assent, then return to the pitch, in order to display the incantatory power of those words.

Because the second half looked like a game of sharks-versus-seals. Real Madrid were just that much better. Juventus had given up three goals total through their Champion’s League campaign to that point. Real Madrid scored four in 90 minutes.

And what are we supposed to make of Zinedine Zidane as a manager? He led Real Madrid’s B-team to consistent mediocrity before being given the job of managing Real, which is merely the single most scrutinized managerial job in all of footballdom, and that’s before trying to appease insane club president Florentino Pérez. After a season-and-a-half at the helm, Zidane has managed to win the league once and the Champions League twice. How the hell is that even possible? You could, I suppose, argue that the Champions League wins were just radical good fortune (but I won’t–you don’t take down Juventus’ defense like that without playing brilliant football), but to finish ahead of Barcelona over a 38-match league season requires a level of consistency that can only be achieved by being actually, you know, really good.

How much of the credit do you give to Zidane? After all, it’s not like he’s actually one of the people kicking the ball around. The squad is full of world-class players. But results of this consistency would seem to suggest that Zidane’s years being one of the greatest players in the world equipped him to be one of the greatest managers as well.

Every week the chaos in our society seems to deepen. That is our trajectory now, and it will continue to be our trajectory until enough people stop irrationally seeking magic from our erstwhile leaders–“I’ll bring back all the jobs!”–stop enabling chaos through their own destructive anger, and start seeking balance within themselves. The problem is not those people. The problem is not out there. We are the problem. Our lack of balance is what’s creating this situation. It is only in seeking balance that the problem can be solved.

Simona Halep led 6-4 3-0. To this point in the match, Halep had been the better player, handling Jelena Ostapenko’s superior firepower with her own superior movement, and letting Ostapenko unforced-error herself into trouble. It looked like Halep was going to win.

Ostapenko was serving. Her serve had been shaky all day, but she was first to game-point at 40-30. Halep won the point to force deuce, then won the next to take the advantage. Ostapenko forced Halep into an error to save the break point. An Ostapenko unforced error gave Halep another chance. Ostapenko hit a forehand winner to bring things back to deuce. Ostapenko double-faulted to give Halep a third break point. Halep hit an unforced error to even things again. Three chances was all Halep got. Ostapenko won the next two points and the game.

Surely it would have been over at 4-0. But now it was 3-1. Then Halep got broken for 3-2 and back on serve. Halep jumped to a 15-40 lead in Ostapenko’s next service game. Surely Halep will convert one of these, I thought. If she does, I predicted, she will stop the bleeding and win the match. But she didn’t convert, and the match tied up at 3-3.

Then Halep got broken again. She broke back, but then was broken yet another time. Ostapenko held serve and the match was tied, one set all.

Perhaps there at 3-0 Halep took a little off, or perhaps Ostapenko finally got over her nerves, or perhaps it was both, but in the second set and on to the third Ostapenko seemed to dial in. In the first set, she hit 14 winners to 23 unforced errors. In the second it was 22 to 18. In the third, 18 to 13. Her service return was particularly lethal. She rifled down-the-line return winners on point after point. It was fun to watch; her play made me laugh. Ostapenko is delightful that way, just blasting away every chance she gets.

Halep had her chance with those five break points over those two games, and it seemed later that the favor of the tennis gods swung the other way after that. At 3-3 in the third, with Halep serving at 30-40, Ostapenko hit a backhand down the line that was going to land a couple of feet out–but instead it clipped the net cord, bounced straight up, and landed just inches inside Halep’s side of the court. Ostapenko threw her hands up in apology, but we don’t have to apologize when the gods smile down on us. Perhaps Halep knew then that it wasn’t to be her day.

The last point of the match came with Halep serving into the ad court. Ostapenko stepped up to the ball, for the however-manyth time that day, and blasted a backhand down the line. Halep never had a chance at it, and 20-year-old Jelena Ostapenko won the French Open.

Let’s hope Ostapenko keeps it up. I hope there’s no hangover going into Wimbledon. I want to see her do the same thing there.

Besides La Décima, of everything else that happened during the French Open, it was Novak Djokovic all but sprinting scared from the court during and after his third set against Dominic Thiem that my mind keeps coming back to. To think that a year ago, he looked absolutely invincible. Now, he floats along in a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a wide, wide ocean, and lacks any obvious means of propulsion.

I was going through old recordings on the DVR, and I happened to find the last fifteen minutes of the final of last year’s U.S. Open. The narrative of the Open going into that match was, “See, this summer was just a blip. Novak is back in the final.” But I believe strongly now that his erstwhile success there hid just how big the problem he was facing really was. It took him four sets to get out of his first round match against Jerzy Janowicz, the kind of player he was beating six months earlier in a fashion that looked more like a workout on the practice court than an actual competitive match. He got a walkover in the next round, then his opponent retired just six games in in the third. Yes, in the fourth, he dispatched Kyle Edmund in three easy sets. In the quarters, he got up two sets to none against Jo-Wilfred Tsonga before Tsonga retired. He looked shaky in beating Gael Monfils in four sets, Gael Monfils who played a strange, almost disrespectful match, appearing to want to annoy Novak more than actually play against him. Monfils admitted afterward that he simply didn’t believe that he could actually beat Novak Djokovic, which I promise you guaranteed that he couldn’t. But all of that was forgotten as Djokovic made the final. He made the final! Novak is back!

He won the first set in that final in a tiebreak, but he lost the second and third and, at the point where my recording started, was down a break in the fourth. Over the course of the match, he’d been pretty much comprehensively outplayed by Stan Wawrinka. During one of his final return game, the camera caught him wearing a look on his face just like we saw last week against Dominic Thiem. It was not just that he was losing, and he didn’t like to lose. He looked, instead, like a man utterly lost. Like the question he was asking himself wasn’t, “Why can’t I win today?” but instead, “Who is this person in what used to be my body?”