Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

A few weeks ago, I experienced a perfect day.

It wasn’t perfect as it was happening. It was just a day. Some good stuff happened, some less-good stuff happened. I experienced moments of pleasure and moments of worry. Like I said, just a day.

It wasn’t until evening that its perfection revealed itself to me. A question arose in my mind: “Of the things actually under my control, what of this day would I have changed?” The answer hit me with pugilistic force: of that under my control, I would have changed nothing.

Perhaps happy is too complicated and tricky a word to use without some careful explanation. When we mean happy in opposition to sad, then we’re speaking of something as fleeting and changeable as any other emotion. It arises and it passes away. Many of us, myself included, try to hold on to the happy moments and push away the sad ones, a life-approach about as effective as going for a walk and trying to keep seeing the pretty flower you passed 100 yards ago and not see the ugly construction site you’re walking by right now.

But in these moments of aliveness, I have discovered a broader, less transitory sense of happiness. A true acquiescence to the present moment brings with it an equanimity that can contain the fleeting effervescence of joyful experiences as well as the passing rain-squalls (and even the occasional socked-in storm-fronts) of sad ones.

It’s like I am finding that in the face of whatever arises, I can say not just, “I am here,” but also, “Where else would I go?”

A couple of weeks ago, I went skiing at Crested Butte for a couple of days. Crested Butte has a well-deserved reputation for having some very steep runs. I have the technique to ski these runs–I get down them safely. But I can’t do it without substantial struggle. I tend to get overwhelmed by fear and cut all my momentum after every turn, so I never find rhythm or flow. Too much of the time, it’s basically what we call “survival skiing.” It gets frustrating, because I have the physical abilities to ski the run, but clearly something I do with my energy gets in the way.

Well, I’m pretty deeply devoted to this TTW stuff, so instead of just grinding through the frustration, or else giving up on skiing the steeps at all, I tried to figure out what was happening and what to do about it. So again and again and again I breathed deeply from center, connected my energy to ground, breathed my stress back into the Earth, and tried to witness what exactly was happening in my body and with my energy to make me struggle so consistently.

After enough attempts to step out of my patterns of stress and return to centered consciousness, I had a moment of insight. I discovered that when I find myself in that patterned fear response, it results from having cast my energy all the way to the bottom of the slope, essentially leaving my body to fend for itself. “I’ll meet you down here,” my energy calls back up to me. Well, it’s hard to be more out-of-center than letting your energy get 50 or 100 yards away from you. And the result is that I struggle and struggle and struggle to ski the run.

I wish I could say that I fixed the problem with that awareness, but it doesn’t work that way. What I could do, however, is come back to center. I could bring my energy back to me, and then I could be present with the fear in a different way: I could just let it be, just feel it, instead of running from it. I found that rather than sending my energy down to the bottom of the slope and leaving my body to fend for itself, I could expand my energy outward from center to create a space of awareness able to contain my body, my fear, and my next couple of turns. For a few moments, I could release the old pattern like a balloon and watch it float away.

This sensation is what we mean by a state of ease. The things that get in the way go away, even if only for a moment, and I can just be in the present moment and allow it to flow, as is its true nature.

Of course, soon enough I’ll again fall out of center and return to my habitual unconscious state, and the easy experience of my old pattern will arise again. And that’s completely okay. This is a practice, not a destination.

So I keep practicing.

In response to these moments, I find myself following a line of thinking: This thing happening is in fact my life. So my real life is not somewhere out there in the distance, and when I find it I will finally be happy. Right here and right now, I am alive. So perhaps I should choose to be happy now.

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.