One day I was thinking about how liberating it would feel to stop pushing up against deadlines, like, ever. I asked myself, How would it feel to have two weeks of pieces in the can at all times?
It would feel pretty good.
How about a month?
Better.
How about six weeks?
Now you’re talking.
Over the next several weeks, a fair number of the pieces I’ll be publishing here are going to be shorter than you (and I) are accustomed to seeing.
It’s not you, it’s me. I just need a little space.
I need a little space to build up a surplus of pieces. I have a goal to have six weeks of pieces in the can at any given time.
And I need a little space to finally do the work–work that remains well beyond my current knowledge base–to enable Free Refills to truly do what I need it to do, which is to be the effective home base for my entire writing career.
In his piece on Tuesday, Jerry boldly declared our experiment a success. We’re ready to teach, he said.
I wouldn’t have made that declaration without him doing so. I might have gotten hung up on that my golf game is still very much a work in progress. How far have we come? Very far. How far do we still have to go? Well, any concept of a final destination is unskillful thinking, but even if we limit ourselves to our initial goals (Jerry breaking 90 regularly, me breaking 100), I suspect I still have a way to go.
So are we ready to teach?
Absolutely we are. But let’s be very specific in exactly what we’re here to teach. We’re both practicing golf avidly, but we’re not doing it just or even primarily to learn golf. If that’s your main goal, you are probably better served by finding someone who teaches more traditionally than we do–we can model centering, we can model our own practice, but neither of us can model a completed swing. By some measures, I’m no more than a highly devoted advanced beginner. Jerry would probably call himself an intermediate-level golfer.
But if your goal is an exploration of yourself, a willingness to confront your deep tendencies that get in the way of you meeting your highest potential–in all walks of life–then we’re exactly the people you want to work with. I am unequivocally a better golfer and tennis player than before I started practicing with these principles. But far more important is how deeply I have come to understand barriers and blocks that I (and others!) put in my way from a very young age. More important still is that I am starting to release those blocks, and that release is making me a better person. I am living a better life. Yes, my golf game and tennis game have improved, but that pales in comparison to how much my life has improved.
The answer isn’t either/or. It’s both/and.
I want the focus and direction and structure that deadlines provide, and I want the flexibility, room for growth, expansiveness, and movement away from simple day-to-day concerns toward something bigger that a buffer between my work and the endless treadmill of the here-and-now offers.
So the question is: How do I take the benefits of deadlines that I’ve seen over the last year-and-a-half and evolve them so that I can leave behind the things that I hate about deadlines without falling into complacency or slackness, of which I am totally capable? How do I leverage their power–the way they help me focus, the way they keep me overcoming my paralyzing perfectionism–while creating a system that feels less constained, more expansive? I want my work to grow. What structures do I put in place to enable and empower my further evolution as a writer (and as a person)?
I hate deadlines. I hate the stress of butting up against them. I hate that sometimes I’m not 100% in love with a piece that I publish. I hate that sometimes I feel I have to compromise on quality in order to get something finished in time.
I love deadlines. I love that they force me to focus. I love that I’ve come to treat them with near-religious devotion–I do not miss my deadlines. I love that they force me to move beyond my tendency toward perfectionism. I love discovering that I can say something worthwhile, even when it isn’t perfect. I love learning to trust that I can say something worthwhile, even when it isn’t perfect. (These are two different things.) And I love that they’ve shown me that what I feel about a piece at a given moment has little bearing on the ultimate quality of that piece.
I hate deadlines. I hate that the consistent pressure of meeting them has kept my work focused on what’s immediately happening in my life rather than stretching out into work that’s aimed to be more timeless.
I love deadlines. I love that working with them has given me the skills to turn around a quality piece in a short amount of time when it’s necessary.
I love deadlines. I love that over the last year-and-a-half they’ve provided me with the structure to empower myself both as a writer and as a person. They’ve gotten me out of my comfort zone, gotten me taking risks to do work that I’m proud of. They’ve enabled me to trust myself in a way that I hadn’t in a long, long time.
I hate deadlines. I hate the feeling of always being this close to missing one.
I love deadlines. But I’m tired of always being this close to missing one.
Though I unequivocally do not believe in writer’s block, some days I just don’t have anything to say, which is different.
Today I don’t have anything to say.
Today I’ve been thinking a lot about the golf swing. I have a new hypothesis about how the golf swing should feel, but I’m still new enough to the idea that I don’t really have anything more to say about it than what I just said.
I’ve also been thinking today about the election, and about Donald Trump, and about the future of this country, but I don’t want to say anything about any of that. Does anyone? I assume everyone feels like I do, that life has become like one of those weird dreams where you’re asleep in the dream, and you keep trying to wake up, and you wake up, only you find that you’ve woken up into another dream, and again you wake yourself, and again you find yourself in another dream, and all you want to do is wake up for real and finally get out of this weird recursive purgatory. Only in this dream apparently there’s no waking up.
Doesn’t everyone in America feel like this?
So I’m not gonna say anything today. I’ll just write a little nothing piece, keep my publishing promise, and go to sleep. And in that sleep I’ll embrace whatever dreams may come.
I have spoken many times recently about my desire to unlock the power of my golf swing. The skills I have cultivated through my centering practice, especially the ability to feel more accurately and acutely what’s going on in my body, have allowed me to notice that, when I work on power, I clench the muscles in my jaw when I swing: I don the stony mask of grim determination.
Do I even need to say that there can be no benefit to this expression of tension? Whenever I experience a moment’s breakthrough in one of the sports I practice, it’s always accompanied by a feeling of effortlessness. In skiing and mountain biking, I experience it as near-weightlessness, as though flying. In soccer or tennis, I’ll accomplish something at or beyond the limits of my ability with an ease that makes success seem pre-ordained. In golf, I feel freedom of flow, with no blockage and no tightness.
In our lesson last week, I witnessed a lot of struggle from my students. One wore the mask of grim determination. The other offered a slight scowl or slump of the shoulders with every ball she hit. They both so wanted to hit the ball better. I tried to convince them that we’re on the right track, that what we’re doing together is working.
But in my own practice, I still find myself wearing that stony mask. It seems I don’t fully trust that I myself am on the right track, that what I’m doing is working.
I know I don’t want to go through life wearing that grim mask. But it is not enough to say, “I don’t want to hit with grim determination.” After all, as we’ve said, the body doesn’t know not. So how do I remove the mask?
I began to ask myself, “Can I hit the ball joyfully?” I began practicing some 30ish-yard pitches, and I set that as my goal: I wanted to discover what hitting the ball joyfully would feel like.
Would I claim to have completely figured it out? No. Sometimes my hitting was fun. Sometimes I got frustrated.
But I did notice this:
It was a beautiful day in late September, sunny and warm, and I was in a giant green-grass park, the entire thing essentially a playing field. I was holding an oddly-shaped stick, and I was using it to try to hit little white balls up in the air in smooth and lovely arcs toward a distant flagstick. In the grand scheme of things, that’s kind of a silly thing to do, don’t you think? But I found pleasure in the motion of swinging that stick, and delight in the ping that sounded when the stick’s striking face contacted the ball just so, and beauty in the balls’ smooth arcs.
Framed like this, do you wonder, as I do, why we struggle so?
Is it clear to those of you who read here regularly that what I’m ultimately trying to do with all this work is change the world?1
At a time when just about everyone carries an internet-connected device in their2 pocket all the time, it can be easy to forget that just 20 years ago, the World Wide Web was barely a thing. This revolution has just begun. Forms and approaches may look established, but they’re not, not really. We haven’t yet moved out of the we-have-no-real-idea-what-we’re-doing-let’s-experiment phase. There’s still ample opportunity for better ideas to win.
The people who ruled the old system have done much to put the brakes on. It’s always this way; no one cedes power without a fight. But holding things back for the comfort of the old system’s winners benefits no one–the old winners don’t keep winning, they just get to ossify.
The old system did me no favors. And I believe that my imagination about what’s possible in the new world is as astute and creative as that of anyone. Words are cheap, of course. But I’m here in action.
You have to agree, at the very least, that, compared to a world in which refills aren’t free, the better idea, by far, is Free Refills.
1 Maybe not in some huge, grandiose way. A modest statue commemorating my contributions would be sufficient.
2 Another way I wish to help change the world is by putting my weight behind making "everyone…their" (and related forms) become accepted as standard grammar.
People ask me pretty regularly what I’m working on. You’ve heard the term elevator pitch? It means being able to describe your project in less than the duration of an elevator ride in a way that piques your audience’s interest.
Well, I cannot seem to do a proper elevator pitch about the writing I’m working on.
I do my best to give a concise explanation. I say something like, “Jerry and I are writing a couple of books about how we learn sports, with the operating hypothesis that the way sports are taught now doesn’t work for most people, and that we have a better way.”
I can probably count on one hand the number of people who’ve heard that explanation and showed any further interest in the work.
The problem is not the topic. I am dead certain the topic is interesting. It’s also not the people I’m speaking to. Enough of them are athletes that the subject should interest at least some of them. So there’s something about either what I’m saying or the way I’m saying it that is failing to connect with my audience. Am I expressing some core diffidence or discomfort? Am I in some way communicating that I want this conversation to end?
I need to figure this out. I don’t want the conversation to end. I want to generate interest. So what do I need to change?