Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

I carry with me some deep regrets. When I look back to those moments in my life when I chose against the calls of my soul, to the question, “Why?” the answer is almost always, “I acted out of fear.”

“Out of fear.” A common idiom, rarely examined, but look closely: what does it say? Usually idioms that have become deeply ingrained in our language contain a profound core wisdom. Examine them closely and they point you toward the truth.

“I acted out of fear.” Fear as a place you inhabit.

Enough with the regrets. I seek, now, to heed the calls of my soul. And yet there is always fear.

I took a close look at the phrase and wondered: Does the answer to the challenge posed by these moments–these moments that so often define our lives–live in the language as well? Is the answer contained in the idiom’s opposite: to act into fear?

Earlier today, I met with a coaching client of mine. She spoke about her experience as she’s making writing into a daily practice. She also alluded to an intention she spoke of the last time we met, that she’d do some work with her website, “…but I didn’t do that,” she said.

I can see a growing energy as her practice develops. Already, there’s more flow, less struggle. There’s a spaciousness as she meets herself where she is. It’s all really good stuff.

I said to her, “It can be really easy to imagine a version of ourselves that’s further down the path than where we are now, and then compare our current selves to that image, see that we aren’t there yet, and then beat ourselves up over it. In doing so, we can diminish in our own eyes the genuine value of the work we are doing.”

“It’s a process,” I said. “Give it space to develop. Be gentle with yourself.”

After our meeting, I turned back to my own work and the bit I’m struggling with. I picked myself up by the lapels and shook myself, scolding, “Why are you still struggling to create a less-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to publishing?”

Umm…

I had a very busy Sunday, and so was only able to dip my head occasionally into the Masters. When I checked on Spieth during the latter holes of the front nine, he was several strokes ahead and seemed to be cruising. But when I checked back a couple of hours later, I found Spieth several strokes back, and the commentators were talking about a “meltdown.” After looking a sure thing to win his second Masters in a row at the age of 22, he ended up having to put the Green Jacket on Danny Willett.

A few days later, Jerry and I spoke about it. “The energy of it was fascinating,” he said. “You should watch and see what you think.”

So I did.

Because I hadn’t been able to pay close attention on Sunday, I first went and did a little research. Just how had the round played out before Spieth’s meltdown? What had Spieth done to be cruising during the earlier part of his round? I looked at his scorecard, and what I saw grabbed my interest. After a bogey on five, he birdied the next four holes, and started the back nine with a five-stroke lead.

I went back to five and watched from there.

On five, his drive left him on the left side of the fairway behind some trees. For his second shot, he attempted a low-margin sharp hook that he failed to fully execute, leaving himself with a challenging chip just off the grandstand on the side of the green. He then two-putted for a bogey. Though laying up may have been a better play, it was hard to fault his aggressiveness.

Afterwards, he played beautifully. His approach play left him easy putts on seven and eight, but his birdie putts on six and nine were both quite challenging. When he made the last of these, he had moved himself to -7. He genuinely appeared to be cruising.

With my foreknowledge of what was about to happen, I expected to see someone either overconfident or not paying full attention as he started the back nine. Instead, as he took his tee shot, I noticed that he seemed slightly hunched at the upper back. His normally erect posture seemed a little curved in on itself. Now, I don’t yet have a particularly practiced eye for golf technique, but I recognize this posture from my own hitting. Indeed, in my own practice, I’ve been working on trying to stand more erect and pull the shoulders back in order to open the chest. “If I’m right in what I’m seeing,” I thought, “He’ll hit it right.” And he did. His 3-wood off the tee landed in the rough. On his next shot his body alignment looked similar. I predicted that he’d be short and to the right. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The ball landed in the bunker on the front right of the green. His sand shot looked lazy and he left it well short of the pin. He missed his par-putt about a foot right, and holed in for bogey.

Meanwhile, Danny Willett had a chance for eagle on the par-5 13th, missed but managed a birdie. A five-stroke advantage had just become three.

Spieth hit driver off eleven, and his swing looked better to me, but he went right again, into the trees, and left himself no shot at the green. He had no choice but to chip out to the fairway. His next shot was announced as “122 yards,” and he hit right at the pin, ending up below the hole, about six feet away. His par putt missed just below the hole, and he tapped in for bogey.

Meanwhile, on 14, Willett put his drive into the second cut, then hit a beautiful second shot to within three or four feet of the pin. After Willett made his birdie putt, Spieth’s five-stroke advantage had fallen to one.

There was a huge grandstand behind the tee on the par-3 twelfth, and I have to assume there was a leaderboard there as well, and I have to assume that Spieth saw it. Because, again, I watched his shoulders hunch forward and his back curl slightly downward. Once again, he hit short and right. The ball hit below the green and fell back into Raes Creek.

His wedge from the drop zone looked even more extreme. Watch the curve in his upper back and the way his shoulders extend away from his body:

That’s one of the worst shots you’re likely to ever see a professional golfer hit.

Now lying five, and desperate to not leave his next shot short, he hit well long into the back bunker. He got out of the sand and close to the pin for his sixth shot, and then made his putt for a quadruple-bogey seven.

As this was happening, Willett’s tee shot on the par-5 15th left him needing to lay up. He pitched close, then two-putted for par, staying at -4. His playing partner, Lee Westwood, rolled over the green for his second shot, then hit an amazing chip for eagle to go to -3. On 14, Dustin Johnson made par to stay at -2. Spieth’s quadruple dropped him from -5 and the lead to -1, into a tie for fourth.

It is a testimony to how good he is that he was still in contention late in the round, that he didn’t freak out completely and shoot like eighteen-over the rest of the way. At the same time, isn’t it interesting that once he’d lost the lead in so dramatic a fashion, his play immediately improved?

So what happened? I wouldn’t be surprised if, as he made the turn, he thought to himself, “So long as I don’t collapse, I’ve got this in the bag.” As Jerry likes to point out, “The body doesn’t know ‘not.'” By thinking something like collapse, he engendered in his body the fear to do exactly that. The extension of his shoulders and the curve of his upper back look like someone collapsing his body around his heart to protect himself from fear. It’s something I see a lot with my beginning ski students–and something I have recently noticed in myself in both skiing and golf. In Spieth’s case, by fighting the fear, he put more energy into it, thereby enabling it. Once the collapse was done, he could release the energy, relax and resume playing his game, though sadly now no longer from a position to win.

If you are a fan of sports at all and you aren’t putting some energy into paying attention to the English Premier League this year (for the uninitiated, I’m talking about the sport we call soccer), you are missing one of the great sports stories of all time in Leicester City and their run at the Premier League title.

At the beginning of April last year, Leicester sat last in the Premier League on 19 points with nine games to play. The bottom three teams get relegated; Leicester were seven points behind the 17th-place team. Over those last nine matches, Leicester won seven and drew one, a remarkable run, and finished the season in 14th place.

A little more than a year later, they sit atop the Premier League table. They have a seven-point lead over my beloved Tottenham Hotspur. Assuming Tottenham are perfect the rest of the way, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games to win the league.

Is it possible for a team, rather than the players on it, to take performance enhancing drugs?

This is a Cinderella story like nothing anyone has ever seen. No analogy I’ve been able to come up with does it justice. Some cupcake 16-seed winning the NCAA tournament? That’s not even close to an adequate comparison. Even the best teams in the NCAA, teams comprised entirely of future pros, are still teams of amateurs in their teens and early 20s. No matter how good a top team is, it’s still incredibly green and unformed. The top teams in the Premier League are comprised of seasoned professionals, some of the best players in the world.

Furthermore, to win the NCAA, that storied cupcake 16-seed Cinderella only needs six wins in a row. Whereas I would argue that league soccer is the best, fairest competition in sports. Every team in the league plays every other team home and away, and the winner is the team with the best overall record over the course of the entire season. No one gets an easy path against weaker teams. There’s no series of playoffs. There’s no way a lucky streak can bring, for example, a sub .500 team into March Madness, as can happen in NCAA basketball. There’s no way a terrible division can allow an 8-8 team into the playoffs, as can happen in the NFL. In league soccer, a six- or eight-game hot streak is lovely, but it won’t make up for poor play for the rest of the season. The league rewards consistent form from the start of the season until the end–a season that lasts from mid-August until mid-May, by the way. Over a 38-match, nine-month season, there’s no choice but to navigate inevitabilties like accumulated fatigue and injuries.

Leicester City were given odds of 5000-to-1 to win the Premier League. By contrast, the Philadelphia 76ers were 250-to-1 against winning the NBA Championship in 2015-16. Read that again. The Philadelphia 76ers, a team that literally sometimes plays a cardboard cutout of ex-US Men’s National Team member Mike Burns¹ as its fifth player^{[citation needed]} and has gone 25-631 over the past eight seasons,^{[citation needed]} were considered twenty times more likely to win their championship than Leicester City was.

The closest analogy I can come up with to what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing is this: Imagine an NBA where, instead of us having to put up with shitty teams in the NBA East like the Knicks and the 76ers embarrassing themselves and professional sports and all of America every year, each year the worst three teams get sent down to play in the D-League, and the top three teams from the D-League get to take a shot at the NBA. I have no idea what cities are in the D-League and neither does anyone else, so let’s pretend that at the end of the 2013-2014 season, the Knicks, the Nets and the 76ers all got sent down to the D-League (as they should have been) and the, let’s say, Des Moines Flamethrowers, the Huntsville (Alabama) Stilettos and the Boise Waterboarders all got to come play against Golden State and San Antonio and the rest. Let us further posit that the NBA had done away with the salary cap and just let the market dictate who played where, which would mean that top teams would regularly raid lesser teams for quality personnel, creating a self-perpetuating system in which the top teams make the most money so they have the most money to spend on the top players who then go play for the top teams.

(Quick aside: Have you ever found it interesting that in America, where, notwithstanding Bernie Sanders’ presidential run, the word socialist is pretty much a slur, we choose to enforce salary caps in most of our professional sports in order to maintain “a level playing field?”)

Now imagine that Boise, featuring players no one else even dreamed of wanting, had a 3-0 series lead and a 15-point lead at halftime in game four of the NBA finals. Imagine the bricks you would be shitting.

To call this story “unlikely” doesn’t do it justice. If it weren’t actually happening, it would sound like a story that had been rejected by Hollywood as too maudlin.

That’s what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing.

Speaking of Hollywood: Leicester City’s biggest star is their forward, Jamie Vardy. Just four years ago, he was plying his trade for non-League Fleetwood Town. Now, he is the second-top scorer in the Prem, currently just one goal behind Harry Kane. The conversation piece of, “If they made a movie about your life, who would play you?” is in his case not academic: right now the rumored names include Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio. (All of whom, you’ll note, are North American. But maybe that isn’t as outrageous as it sounds. Currently topping the list to play me in the movie version of my life are two Brits, Sir Ben Kingsley and Idris Elba.)

And if I were Hollywood, why stop there? A rags-to-riches biopic about handsome, hardworking Jamie Vardy is pretty obvious. Why not a movie about the unlikely triumph of the team as a whole? We’ll frame it within a rom-com and give it a name that’s a trying-to-be-clever pun on some football term. Off the Bar or something like that. I’d cast Rosario Dawson as a plucky, slightly scattered and strangely nationalistic American graduate student who initially abhors what she derisively calls “soccer,” declaring early in the movie that “properly speaking, football is a game played by armored gladiators carrying the ball with their hands.” But she discovers an unlikely love for the game via her equally unlikely relationship with a diehard Leicester City fan, a charming, hangdog pub owner played by Colin Firth. I see dollar signs, Hollywood, and I know you do too. Call me.

But I digress.

As of last weekend, Leicester officially qualified for next year’s Champions League, which means that next fall, several teams from the most rarefied stratum of world football–teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and AC Milan–will come to tiny Leicester to do battle in the King Power Stadium.

At this point, only a collapse more complete than Jordan Spieth’s will keep them from winning the title. As I said above, assuming Tottenham are perfect from here, which includes a game at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games. That’s three wins or two wins and three draws. Admittedly, they have a tricky schedule the rest of the way. They play against West Ham this weekend, then have a relatively easy game against Swansea at home, a somewhat trickier match against Everton, before finally finishing the season with tough matches away at ManU and Chelsea. But the assumption of perfection from Spurs is, shall we say, a difficult one. And Leicester’s path got a little easier when West Ham, holding an outside chance at qualifying for the Champion’s League, had a bad call in their game against Crystal Palace two weekends ago lead to a player being sent off, after which Palace equalized, and then last weekend against Arsenal saw blown offside calls incorrectly negate a goal for them and allow one for Arsenal. Both matches ended in draws. Then West Ham lost at home to a mediocre Manchester United side in a quarterfinal F.A. Cup replay yesterday. They’re looking a bit demoralized.

I am a die-hard Tottenham fan. This is Spurs’ best chance of winning the league since 1961, and I’m nevertheless excited at the prospect of Leicester winning the league. You should be too. You should watch. It’s gonna be great.

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¹ Mike Burns played defense for the USMNT during the 1998 World Cup. The USMNT played Iran in the first game of the U.S.’s ignominious 32nd-out-of-32-teams performance. On one Iranian corner, Burns had the defensive role of covering one of the posts. Iran scored between him and the post, leading some clever commentators to point out that on that play, actual flesh-and-blood Mike Burns would have been outperformed by a cardboard cutout of Mike Burns.

Let’s review. In 1994, a nineteen-year-old college student figured out that technological changes already underway were going to completely obviate the notion of scarcity in the space of recorded music.

Five years later, Napster happened, and the music industry–comprised of people who made a lot of money selling recorded music, and so presumably had a stake in what was happening and about to happen in their industry–was taken totally by surprise.

(I’m not saying this to toot my own horn. I mean, if I’d really been prescient, I would have changed my major to computer science, the program would have been called Benster, and I’d live now in a solid gold house and drive a rocket car.)

What I didn’t count on was how viciously people will fight to protect something to which they believe themselves entitled.

That whole supply and demand piece had another wrinkle. Digital recording gear was no less subject to Moore’s Law than any other computer equipment. By 1994, it was obvious that, soon enough, average musicians would be able to afford to buy gear of sufficient quality that they could record and release albums outside of the usual industry channels, and there was nothing the gatekeepers in the industry could do to stop them. The supply, in the sense of variety, of recorded music was about to go way, way up. Demand, of course, would stay roughly the same.

Supply and demand gets taught on the first day of Economics 101. We go so far as to call it a law. It is the bedrock principle on which we base our whole understanding of economics.

More than 20 years after I wrote that paper, the music industry is still trying to pretend that supply and demand doesn’t exist.

Right around the time I came up with the Great Idea, I was taking a Sociology class called “Music and Social Movements.” For my final paper, I wrote about the implications of the digitization of music. I asserted that digitization, coupled with this little thing called the Internet, was going to end the music industry as we knew it. Because digital copies could be infinitely copied with no degradation in quality, and because distribution would be so close to free as to be essentially free, a marginal cost per copy of zero meant that the supply of any digitized music (i.e. all music being recorded at that time, and everything analog that had been digitized) was functionally infinite. Infinite supply meeting finite demand would dictate that the cost of recorded music would fall, basically, to zero.

This was 1994. I was nineteen years old. Five years later another college kid would write a computer program called Napster. You know what happened next.

Jerry and I had a practice session yesterday at the chipping green and driving range that left me quite frustrated.

As of right now in my golf practice, I’m incapable of hitting anything longer than about a nine-iron. I’ve been feeling a bit demoralized, so I’m trying to find my way past the struggle and discover new ways to practice and improve.

This spring, I’ve been working on initiating both my up- and downswings from the hips rather than letting the arms lead. The result, when I’ve succeeded, has been effortless power and beautiful flight paths. I’ve been most successful at it chipping and pitching, and while “effortless power” isn’t something you may particularly want in your chipping, I’ve been willing to accept overhitting the hole in exchange for substantially better direction and loft.

I came to yesterday’s practice session with a question I wanted to test: would it be possible to practice chipping with, say, a six-iron, and begin to groove that same swinging-with-the-lower-core that I’ve been playing with on pitches and nine-irons, and then bring that groove to the range on full-swing six-irons?

So far the answer is: nope. (Anti-climax, I know.) But my struggle and frustration led us to some ideas that will be interesting to play with over our next practice sessions. We think we identified some physical patterning in stance and alignment that I’ve done so long I’m no longer aware of them, patterns that are substantially getting in the way of a smooth, fluid swing. A fair amount of my practice over the next several weeks may be as simple and unexciting (but critical) as addressing the ball over and over, trying to groove a new stance.

Not to say that there weren’t a few real positive results (rather than potentialities and areas for future practice) from the session. The most notable was that on a couple of occasions, practicing chipping with the six-iron, I hit the ball extremely cleanly. The sound of a cleanly struck ball is unmistakable and tells me that I’m doing something right, and gives me hope that I’ll be able to do so again.

(I should note that while I struggled during the session, Jerry, playing with the idea of chipping with longer clubs and putting a similar focus on the hips as the driving impulse of the shot, ended up hitting seven-irons at the range so well he was giggling.)

After we finished at the range, I decided to go to the tennis courts to hit some serves while bringing that same focus on the hips. I also decided I would approach the shot differently from how I ever have before. Rather than try to emulate the smooth, unified toss-hit motion I see from top servers, I decided to just toss the ball up high enough that I could kind of reset before swinging through. Because I wanted to get the feeling of swinging from the hips and letting the arm follow, I gave myself permission to do nothing more than try to strike the ball that way, with no focus on aiming at all. To my surprise, I immediately found myself hitting some of the smoothest, most powerful serves of my life, with surprising accuracy. To my further delight, the sound of the ball leaving the strings was, like I describe above in relation to hitting a golf ball, immediately recognizable as an extremely cleanly hit ball. I’ve never heard that sound from my shots before. Previously, all I’ve ever heard when hitting the ball was a relatively high-pitched toink, but yesterday the ball came off the strings with the deeply satisfying pock sound that I’ve heard from better players but have never before achieved.

So while it was partly a frustrating day, and while I may not always be seeing improvement, what I’m hearing is that putting focus on motion from the hips is leading to the potential for definite improvement.

Though my little sister has been quoting the following bit of dialogue from “When Harry Met Sally” for much longer than eight years, eight years ago today it would have worked perfectly:

SALLY: And I’m gonna be 40!

HARRY: When?

SALLY: Someday!

HARRY: In eight years.

SALLY: But it’s there!

Today, it’s no longer there. Today, it is here. Today, my little sister–my baby sister–is 40 years old.

Aging is a funny thing. Back in my late 20s and early 30s, I had conversations with friends in which we agreed that, though we had jobs and paid rent and stuff, we were still waiting to feel like we’d actually become adults.

40 was the age when I finally gave up on telling shopclerks and waitstaff to stop calling me “sir.” I couldn’t deny the obvious reciprocality: I must look as old in their eyes as they looked young in mine. They had ceased to be my contemporaries.

They were telling me, in guileless clarity, that somewhere along the way I’d undeniably become an adult.

I’m still waiting for the day when I feel like it. Of course, I’m old enough now that I feel creaky when I get up in the morning, and neither my knees nor my eyesight are what they once were (not to mention my hairline), and the thought of sharing a house with a bunch of roommates or having a futon for a bed or buying five-dollar bottles of Merlot from Trader Joe’s and actually drinking them by choice all seem laughable now. I live in a college town and have trouble telling the high school kids from the college ones, and I say 42 when someone asks my age and if the lifespans of my family are any indication then I’m halfway-ish through my life and thus literally middle-aged and all of these things point to the same inescapable something that the cute barista calling me “sir” does, and it’s that whatever adultness I’m not feeling must be exactly what denial feels like.

My little sister has been a parent now for almost half her life. She’s a successful business owner. Specifically, she’s responsible enough that for her job, pregnant women come to her and trust her to guide them from the mommies-to-be stage through the about-to-be-mommies stage to the labor-and-delivery stage, at which point she catches their newborns and thus shepherds said women into the holy-crap-we’re-mommies-now stage. It goes without saying that these women look to her as a trustworthy and authoritative individual. Obviously the person I am describing is a far cry from being a kid.

But if you were to ask me for the representative image of us, I would describe to you a photo that lives on my mother’s dresser. My sister and I are aged maybe five and three. I’m wearing a t-shirt and shorts and am lankily long-limbed. My sister is wearing exactly the kind of dress you think of little girls as wearing. We’re outside on the back patio of our house, and she’s holding our cat, Maxwell, whom she could not have loved more. She’s holding him under the front legs so that his belly shows and his legs all stick out and he wears a moderately aggrieved but relatively patient look that says, “I am putting up with this, but I will escape soon.”

We have not been those people for a very long time. Even I, who still struggles to feel like an adult, know that the picture captures a moment long gone now. It seems like it depicts two long-lost people because it does.

And yet it doesn’t. We’re still that. I’m still long-limbed and gangly (in mien if no longer in body) and she’s still most herself holding something smaller than she is, be it furry or young.

Time passes and also time does not pass.

Happy 40th Birthday, Abigail. Birferness on you. Your big brother loves you.

Today is another one of those days. It seemed like it should be a good day, and I felt good in the morning, but somehow it all went wrong. Getting out the door to walk the dog seemed to take an hour. It took an hour to make breakfast. Everything was pissing me off.

Today the Front Range springtime wind is up, and I hear it gusting outside the window. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been so on edge. I remember a day, last autumn maybe, when the howling wind had me wanting to crawl out of my skin. That day I tried to escape by heading to my favorite local coffee shop, but I found no relief there. Though there was no visible discomfort among the people in the room–I saw, as normal, a room full of eyes downcast toward laptops–I quickly became aware I wasn’t the only one feeling shredded by the wind. The feeling grew in resonance with others’ vibrations, and my time there only made it worse.

I escaped for a while this morning into my favorite video game, under the influence of which time certainly flies, at airplane-like velocity. My awareness of the outside wind faded. I felt better by feeling less. And then it arose in my mind that maybe yesterday’s foul mood, like this morning’s, got carried on the energy of the same storm. Yesterday, a beautiful day got pushed away by the advancing clouds and cold, and today the wind whistles, shrieks and howls as the storm finishes moving through. Perhaps the storm carried angry ghosts, mal aire.

Oddly (or perhaps not) once I offered myself the suggestion that the shrill energy of the wind might perhaps be the cause of my dark temper, my mood seemed to settle down a little within me. I’m calm again. The wind was harsh in my ears, sharp on my skin, but now it’s once again just the wind.