Free Refills

A blog’s form dictates that it’s meant to be read backwards, that is, reverse-chronologically.

Free Refills is not a blog, you see, because you’re supposed to read it forward.

The day will come when I bring the work back into the world of things. In that world, writing becomes an object that can be held, and there it makes sense to focus on having written instead of continuing to write. Perhaps not obviously, given my focus on my work at Free Refills, it is in the world of things that the most important aspects of my work exist. Why? Because that is where we live.

There is a way that I’ve never been able to fully express the insight driving what I’m doing. So I persevere. I follow the insight until such time as I am able to say, “Here. This. This is what I mean.” But until I get there, I need to make sure I show up, every single day.

In Jerry’s piece from Tuesday, he spoke of our propensity to meet information without feeling it. He said, “When we stop feeling, the area between right and wrong becomes fuzzy. We can be manipulated by the images we see and the things we hear. It’s truly hard to stay centered and feel the truth.” There’s a reason we don’t feel the information we experience: we are inundated with information that is directly harmful to us if we let it in.

While I was in New Mexico visiting family, I came across a story in the A-section of the Albuquerque Journal with a dateline from somewhere in Oregon headlined, “Man Holding Human Head Stabs Clerk.”

I’m not going to ask you to connect with your center and discover how you feel upon reading this headline. In this instance, I’d prefer that you respond intellectually. Notice that this story has no informational value to you at all. Unless you have some kind of direct connection to what happened–you are on the police force in that town in Oregon, or you know someone involved–there is nothing whatsoever that you can do with this information.

It would be wrong to say that this story’s value is zero. It’s actually worse than that. It’s value is negative, because if you allow a story like this access to your feeling self, it will harm you. The events the story tells of are essentially random. They happened far away from where you live. The horror we feel–or, more likely, recognize that we should feel, without actually feeling–comes from the essential rarity of events like this. However, we evolved in a world in which all information was immediate–someone telling us, “Watch out! There’s a lion over there!”–and our processing systems, both intellectual and energetic, are still rooted in that world. So stories like this, when allowed into the feeling body, are actually a form of poison. They take on an outsize importance and thereby poison our understanding of the world. We come to see events like this as much more common and significant than they really are.

Stories with this kind of negative value abound. You’ll hear about seven children dying in a school bus crash in Tennessee, or a man who kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in Ohio, and what they have in common is that the events in question have no impact on your life, but they tell you the world is a bad place. (These examples, by the way, are meant to be made up, but they probably bear some resemblance to things that actually happened, events that I couldn’t help but have some awareness of just through exposure to news sources.)

Most of us have therefore learned, unconsciously, to not let these sorts of stories have access to our feeling bodies. Unfortunately, because we do this unconsciously, we are training to numb ourselves to negative or problematic occurrences in our lives. (Conversely, when we make the choice consciously, we are doing something good for ourselves, taking control of our own emotional and energetic spaces. Indeed, when we start practicing that kind of approach, we often stop reading or watching the kinds of news sources that offer this kind of information, because we notice it’s easier and healthier to not engage with it at all.)

The impact of practiced numbness is nefarious. We become more and more disengaged from what’s going on around us. The world seems out of our control, beyond our power to do anything about. Numbness about our personal lives dooms us to living attenuated lives, unwilling and unable to change things for the better, either because we believe ourselves powerless to do so, or because we have no felt, emotional access to the value of a potential change. In our political lives, we end up up with a situation like we’re facing now, in which a benumbed populace is no longer able to engage intelligently with the problems it faces and instead chooses wishful-thinking pretend solutions.

While the path to re-engagement is learning to feel, a first step, especially in our political lives, is to stop feeding ourselves poison. If you want to get healthy, first stop doing the things that directly damage your health.

The world of infinite information is not ours, not exactly. In our world, there is enough for everyone to have free refills, too–this belief, that our cups runneth over, is the beating heart of Free Refills, you understand–but the way it works for machines and the way it works for us is different. That’s part of the reason that the age of networked machines has us so confused. It’s not our home. We don’t entirely belong here.

I’ve had important people in my life say to me, “If you don’t think that the daily publishing is working for you, if it’s demanding too much of you to do effectively, if it’s getting in the way of more important work, then stop.” And I’m like, I can’t. I have to find my way through it. Because the essential insights guiding Free Refills still apply. The advent of the machine (itself comprised of many millions of smaller, connected machines) that allows free refills of information–because the marginal cost of a copy is zero–changed everything. We still haven’t come to grips with the new world it brought. In this world it’s no longer enough that I have written; what matters most is that I keep writing.

Yesterday, Roger Federer announced that he wouldn’t be playing in the French Open after all, choosing instead to focus his energy on the grass- and hard-court seasons later this summer. When earlier this spring he announced that he’d skip all of the clay court season except the French, there was some speculation that he’d ultimately choose to skip the French as well. I didn’t think that would be the case, a Grand Slam still being a Grand Slam, but apparently I was wrong.

The announcement on his website said, “I need to recognize that scheduling will be the key to my longevity moving forward. Thus, my team and I concluded today that playing just one event on clay was not in the best interest of my tennis and physical preparation for the remainder of the season.” I have to admit, the decision makes sense. Clay tends to be the most arduous of the surfaces to play on. If Roger wants to maximize his chances of being fully rested for Wimbledon–obviously this is the case–then spending energy playing best-of-five-set matches at Roland Garros, where he would surely win several rounds just because he’s Roger, isn’t in his best interest.

I speak of this in part as introduction to what Rafa has just achieved and is threatening to achieve. I’ve already been talking about the possibility that he could sweep the tournaments in the European clay court swing this year. On Sunday, he took a step closer, beating Dominic Thiem 7-6 (8), 6-4 in the finals of the Madrid Open. Of the five main European clay court tournaments (Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, and Roland Garros), it’s Madrid where Rafa has had the least success, Madrid being considered the fastest of the five, ostensibly because of the elevation there. (Madrid is just over 2000′ high–not all that different from sea level, says the guy who lives in Colorado–so if it’s really the altitude that makes Madrid play faster, it suggests just how fine the margins at the pro level really are.)

And just how impressive was Rafa’s performance this time around? He went three sets against Rafa-killer Fabio Fognini in his first match, then whupped Kyrgios in straights, beat Goffin in straights, beat Djokovic in straights, before beating Thiem in straights in the final. So to answer my question: pretty damn impressive.

Which means that if you’re making predictions for Rome and the French, you’re definitely considering Rafa the prohibitive favorite. With Djokovic and Murray still far from their best (Andy lost at Rome today, in fact), it would seem that the only player capable of beating Rafa is … Rafa himself. The downside to winning all the time is that you play more matches than anyone else. Rafa is thirty now, and the otherworldly recovery abilities he demonstrated as a young man aren’t quite what they once were. He’s been pretty efficient through the clay court tournaments so far, but the wear and tear adds up. It would be pretty awful to see him run through Rome and then get injured in, say, the quarterfinals of the French.

But I sure hope it’s otherwise. Just winning the French, which would be his tenth title, would be incredible. To pick up the Rome title just before it and end up sweeping the European clay courts would be simply incredible. Even he has never done that before. (The closest he’s come was winning everything but Barcelona, back in 2010.)

The cost of all this clay-court dominance may show up later in the season, though. One thinks back to Dominic Thiem’s tale-of-two-seasons 2016, when he played a zillion matches in the first half of the year, winning several titles and making the semis at the French, but then fell off in the second half of the year. With there being no evidence at all that Djokovic or Murray are likely to right their ships anytime soon, it becomes worthwhile to ask if Roger then becomes the favorite to win the at Wimbledon (surely yes) and possibly the US Open as well.

Exciting and interesting times are afoot in the tennis world.

Tottenham Hotspur 2 – Manchester United 1

I certainly believed that one day I would get to White Hart Lane to watch my beloved Tottenham Hotspur play. They’d played at White Hart Lane since forever (1899, to be exact), so clearly they would play there until forever as well.

Except not. There had been talk for several years about building a new stadium, so surely I should have understood that it was only a matter of time. Then last year, plans fully came together, and they actually broke ground. They said the plan was to play one last year in the Lane while the initial work on the new stadium began next door, then spend a year playing their home matches at Wembley while the old stadium was torn down and the new one completed. So it’s not like I didn’t know, but there is that way that far-away things seem far away, so I still didn’t fully internalize that if I wanted to actually see a match there, I better get my ass to London this year. Then things happened the way life does, and whatever remaining dream I had of getting across the pond got shelved, and so it became clear that I would never set foot in White Hart Lane.

I watched yesterday’s final-ever White Hart Lane match because of course I would watch, and it was no roll-over-for-the-home-team testimonial match. ManU still had an outside chance of qualifying directly for the Champions League, and so both teams played an actual soccer match with actual stakes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched Spurs lose to Manchester United, but right now Tottenham are clearly the better team, and they took a 2-0 lead early in the second half and held on well enough to earn the win. In a team’s final-ever match at a beloved old stadium, it’s only proper that they win, but having been a Spurs fan for many years now, I still kind of expected they would find a way to fuck it up, because they’re Spurs. But not this time.

And so they and the rest of their fans and I said goodbye to White Hart Lane in style, beating a tough team, finishing the season unbeaten at home, winning the last 14 of those matches. For one season–this final season–we saw Fortress White Hart Lane. That’s cool.

Change had to come some day, because change always comes. Still, it’s a little disconcerting that something that seemed always is now no more. But then, given the reality of the other shifts in my life, and given that White Hart Lane was for me always more idea than reality (never having set foot in the place), how surprised am I supposed to be? How nostalgic am I supposed to be? Things change, because things always change. In my own life, I am facing the change and saying, “This is for the best.” Surely I can do the same thing for my favorite soccer team, right?

It wasn’t long after I read the initial draft of the piece Jerry published on Tuesday that I came across an article that struck me as relevant to the discussion of how centering allows us to come to learn the underlying truth of every situation.

The article describes the human cost of the the actions of the conspiracy theorists–Truthers, I guess they call themselves–who show up and insist that various atrocities never happened. The article in question deals with the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.

(Here’s a link to the article: Sandy Hook father Leonard Pozner on death threats: ‘I never imagined I’d have to fight for my child’s legacy.’ Be forewarned that there are details about the wounds suffered by his son that make this article a very tough read.)

An acquaintance of mine some years back was a 9/11 Denier. Our incipient friendship ended one night as he drunkenly shouted at me, “You have to accept that 9/11 was inside job!” No, I didn’t, and I didn’t need to be friends with someone who felt it was appropriate to treat me that way. We had an interaction in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, and he insisted that the events in Newtown that day constituted a “PsyOps operation” by the government, designed to distract the American people.

As my acquaintance offered insane details ostensibly contradicting the “official” reports of what happened in Newtown, I remember thinking of rejoinders to his claims, but I wisely chose not to engage in that manner. What was the point? But I also remember a sickening feeling of wrongness in my body as he spoke. I had a literally visceral feeling that the best course of action was to get out of the situation as quickly as possible and never look back. (I completely cut ties with him after that.)

This all happened well before I ever met Jerry, so I had never even heard of centering, and yet I still had a felt, embodied sense of wrongness as I experienced this man’s unhinged diatribe. I guess I can consider myself lucky for that.

To say the very least, we live in complicated times. If we hope to engage effectively with the madness that surrounds us–and in some cases, like this one, madness is not too strong a word–we would be wise to cultivate the skills that will allow us to find our way through the distortions in reality that occur all too often in our society.

I have bigger plans for Free Refills than what I’ve accomplished so far. I always have. But it’s taken over two years, a ton of zero-drafting and a lot of conversations with people who care about me enough to listen as I stumble along logorrheically to get to a point in which I can say exactly what it is I am doing, or planning to do.

And by saying that I’m at that point, I mean I’m pretty sure I can articulate it now. Pretty sure. It’s not simple. It’s still going to require a fair amount of practice and exertion to adequately bring the expression into being and in front of your eyes. I’ve made promises here before about the evolution of Free Refills and I haven’t kept all of them.¹ This promise I will keep, though. It’s going to shift things to a higher gear. But for now, I just need to make the promise, and then say that with my pieces this week, next week, and perhaps even the weeks after, I am building some space for myself so I can do the work to bring it to fruition. With a little space for thinking and writing and editing, soon enough this will all finally make sense. To me as well as everyone else.

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¹ On the core promises, though, I’ve never wavered. 5,000 words per week and daily publishing.