Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

There are many things that I want to get done. Because of how I use time, because sometimes things take longer than I’d like, because sometimes unexpected things come up, because sometimes I put stuff off: things have been piling up. I’ve written before that clutter, be it physical or otherwise, is a double energy drain: the clutter itself is stuck energy, and the awareness of that clutter sucks energy into it.

I have a goal to reduce the clutter–physical, mental, emotional–in my life. But sometimes I think I’m going in the opposite direction. Okay, fine: changing deep seated habits is never easy. So how do I deal with it?

I wrote this a few days ago, after taking my first tentative steps at trying to bring the format and function of Free Refills more in line with my long-term vision for the project:

I have taken the first step in moving forward, and in a sense the clutter in my world is no longer as bad as it was. I’ve been saying, “I need to try this,” and I finally started trying. I put some hours into it. I experimented. It wasn’t likely to get entirely solved all at once. It was going to take some searching and some experimenting, and it will continue to. And what is good is that I didn’t make it into a black hole of time. I did the first bits of work, and I dove a little deeper into the research. So something stuck is now a bit less stuck. And that’s good.

Something stuck is a bit less stuck. Yes, that is good.

I said here that I intended to celebrate the equinox by launching Free Refills 2.0, “a glorious, shiny Free Refills which is clearly and obviously Not a Blog.”

I sorta hit my deadline and sorta not. The behind-the-scenes work has commenced. I finally found and installed a plug-in that allows me to automatically copy posts between Free Refills sites, so I no longer have to manually copy things like my TTW posts to make them appear on the homepage. I’d like to find/create something a bit more powerful so that it’s clear on the main page what sub-domain a certain post is from. I envision having the main page be an aggregator for everything that happens across all of Free Refills. I see the various subdomains of Free Refills as spaces devoted to major projects/concerns of mine, and if it were clear which project a given post belonged to, I’d have more impetus to actually keep those projects active, and my readers would have more awareness that those projects actually exist.

At the same time, I’d be hard pressed to call this Free Refills 2.0. It’s more like 1.0.1. Free Refills still looks more like a blog than anything else. (Except that unlike the vast majority of blogs, I actually update the thing.) I have just dipped my toes into making the shiny, glorious website I describe above.

However, despite not being as far along with the site improvements as I’d envisioned, I’m actually pretty pleased. I understood/understand that this part of the work would/will require a lot of trial and error. I put off beginning this stuff for a long time. Now I have at least begun to chip away at it.

And as I hoped, the little bit of work that I’ve done has brought better into focus what’s next. Further proof, I’d say, that draft-edit-iterate is a powerful method for forward momentum.

(Life is a constant process of learning to trust.)

Happy spring!

It’s a new season, so we have updated rules today.

At least as importantly: I started daily publishing on Free Refills a year ago on the equinox. (Read the inaugural piece here.) That’s right: today is the first piece in the second year of this project. To celebrate that anniversary, here’s a picture of some confetti:

To answer your question, yeah, it feels really good. As soon as I stopped to think about it, it hit me really hard and moved me into a space of reflection. Like, holy shit, I guess I’m pretty committed to this project.

Stick around. I got your back.

Thanks for reading.

My wife has been expressing interest in learning to play tennis. She’s been asking me to go out to the courts with her and teach her a few things. Last Saturday, we went and did so.

Before we went to hit, I asked her, “Have you done any racquet sports before?” She said, “I played a lot of squash in college. But I haven’t played tennis since high school. And back then we were still using wooden racquets.”

That’s a long time ago now, and while playing squash is good for practicing hand-eye coordination, the tennis stroke is completely different. So we were starting not completely from scratch but close to it.

I’m not really qualified on teach more than the very basics of the tennis stroke, but I am able to see things like swing path and what the racquet face is doing. What we found most effective was me standing at the net with a bucket of balls and hitting them to her so she could practice groundstrokes. Unsurprisingly, she hit a lot of them into the net and a lot of them long. In response, I would either say something like, “You opened the racket face on that one” or I would try to demonstrate what I’d seen so she’d have a visual of what her body had done. I figured if I could help her understand the “why” of when her shots went awry, she might be able to use experimentation and her intuitive understanding of what a good swing looks like (from having watched high-level tennis) to improve without me saying too much. Because she’s seen good tennis shots before, some part of her brain/body is trying to emulate what it has seen. My hypothesis was basically this: if you can help a student understand what she did to get the result she didn’t want, she’ll know where to focus her attention as she experiments.

At one point, after hitting the unpteenth ball into the net, she said, “I’m pretty bad at this.” I responded almost automatically: “No, you aren’t bad at this. You just haven’t ever done it much, and you haven’t done it at all for half a lifetime.”

When I say that, I’m not being insincere and I’m not making a semantic distinction without greater significance. Having watched the improvements I’ve seen from my ski students this winter, I have come to believe that most people are capable of doing much more than they give themselves credit for, but they don’t know how to let themselves be beginners. I am convinced that the difference between not doing something well and doing it well is partly good instruction and mostly a willingness to practice.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we try a new activity, compare ourselves to people who’ve practiced it much more than we have, and then declare ourselves to be bad at it? Bad is not a neutral word. In essence, we’re declaring ourselves to be in some way deficient. We’re shaming ourselves. And I’m not claiming that I’m somehow immune to doing the same thing. But I see it all the time and it’s starting to make me sad. We use that judgment to narrow our worlds. We use it to keep ourselves from exploring, from experimenting, from fun. By saying, “Oh, I’m bad at that,” we limit our lives.

“All right then,” said B. “What do we need to pick up?”

A. thought about it. “We need to make a list so we don’t forget anything. Get me a piece of paper.” Responding to his own command, he reached into his backpack, which sat at this feet on the floor in front of the couch, and tore out a sheet of paper from a green-covered spiral notebook and set it on the coffee table. From one of the smaller pockets, he grabbed a retractable pen, clicked it a few times, and began to write. “We need…a cooler. A tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads. A flashlight. No, headlamps.” He was scribbling in large script across the page.

“How about food?”

“Excellent, B., I’d have never thought of that, I was proposing a cooler so that we could fill it with sand, in case we found we needed some sand, but you’re right, food is a better idea to put in the cooler.”

The next day, when they got up, A. proposed, “We should make a list.”

“A list of what?”

“A list of supplies.”

“What sort of supplies do we need? We’re just road tripping around America, aren’t we? We’re not going to accidentally end up in the Sahara or the Amazon, are we?”

“That’s unlikely, I think,” said A. with a straight face. “But you never know. Actually, that’s my point. If we don’t have anything but the car and our clothes, we have to stop for meals. What if we want to camp? What if we want to explore the mountains of eastern Wyoming, for example?”

“Are there mountains in eastern Wyoming? Isn’t that the plains?”

“I have no idea. So what if we get there and there are mountains? It’d be a shame to not be able to go for a hike. Or spend the night in a campground. What if what we’re looking for is hidden among the trees in the mountains in eastern Wyoming, and only comes out under the light of the overhead moon? And what if we miss it simply because, instead of camping, we had to stay in the motel down the road? Wouldn’t that suck?”

“That would definitely suck,” agreed B. It was good to see A. again.

Imagine, if you will, that Maria Sharapova had given a slightly different press conference. Imagine that she had come out to that podium in Los Angeles and said, not that she had failed a drug test, but that a drug that she had been taking for a long time, meldonium, had recently been banned by WADA. Upon seeing it on the list, she had stopped taking it. She just wanted to clear that up for everyone, so there’d be no question about her integrity.

(After she stepped away from the cameras, she pulled out her cellphone and called me. “That went well, I think,” she said.

“Maria,” I said. “This is getting creepy. We’ve never met. Please stop calling me.”)

Now imagine that the rest of the story was pretty much the same: she gave the same rationale for using the drug, described the same duration of usage. The same Latvian drug company came out afterward to say that the way Maria described using the drug was unusual, that it was meant for more short- and medium-term use.

Imagine, too, that the same slew of Russian athletes who are right now failing drug tests right and left continued to fail these drug tests.

In this parallel universe, you would, as here, be hard pressed to conclude that Maria was taking the drug for any reason beside its performance-enhancing benefits. You understand why all these athletes have been using it. You aren’t an idiot; it’s not like they all have heart trouble.

In this parallel universe, Maria broke no rule. Indeed, the tennis governing bodies confirm that she didn’t at any point fail a drug test. She said she stopped taking it and she did. Now I ask you: Is Maria a doper or not?

In honor of Daylight Savings Time, I want to share with you a really great idea. It’s not as a great as a mug that entitles the bearer to free refills, but it’s pretty damn great. Breathe deep and prepare to have your mind blown.

You know how every fall when Daylight Savings Time rolls around, you’re kinda bummed about it getting dark earlier, but that extra hour of sleep that weekend is pretty great? And then in the spring, while you’re delighted to have it stay light later in the day, losing that hour from your weekend kinda sucks? So here’s my great idea: in the spring, instead of moving the clocks one hour forward, we move them twenty-three hours back. So instead of it going from 2am Sunday to 3am Sunday, it goes from 2am Sunday to 3am Saturday. Bang! Three-day weekend!

Pretty excellent idea, don’t you agree?

Now there’s always some killjoy who’s like, “But then the calendar wouldn’t match up. What you gonna do about that, genius?” Simple. We just get rid of a Tuesday. Who’s gonna miss a Tuesday? So around Daylight Savings the days go like this: Friday, Saturday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and then we’re right back to normal–a new normal, substantially more awesome than the one it replaced.

LET’S MAKE IT HAPPEN, AMERICA. WE CAN DO THIS.

Over in TTW this week, some interesting discussion about the energy of the words we use. You should go check it out.

Talon. Tomboy. Unacceptable. Suspension. Bounce. Sharpen. Joist.

Knotted. Brunch. Cinder. Skyscraper. Ravenous.

Choosy. Uptight.

Crystalline. Curveball. Windward. Epigrammatic. Persimmon. Vermilion. Toad.

Pulchritude. Querulous. Petulant. Carpet. Evergreen. Sneeze.