Free Refills

Our initial jumping-off point for this project was the observation that centering and other techniques that Jerry teaches would dramatically help Tiger Woods in his desire to return to being genuinely competitive. I spent a month’s worth of pieces describing how centering would have helped Jordan Spieth at the Masters. In light of the recent pieces from Jerry and me about the practice of centering and how it helps people at our level, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk briefly about how centering might help other people at the top of their game as a way to pique thinking about other ways centering can be useful in our lives.

Because the French Open just ended, I’m going to focus on professional tennis players.

Serena Williams is still the person to beat in women’s tennis, but she tends to get listless and disinterested in the middle of matches and then need a dramatic over-compensation to get back into the match. It’s inefficient and it wears her down. She did this all through the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open last year, and it finally caught up with her in her match against Roberta Vinci. She no longer had sufficient reserves to draw on and she lost. I’m sure it’s clear enough to her when it happens–she is cruising along and suddenly she isn’t. Centering would help her feel as that listlessness sets in and possibly catch it before it became a problem. By feeling the difference between her flow state and her listless state, it would also allow her to let go of it more quickly when it does set in.

Maria Sharapova could benefit as well. Assuming she doesn’t get a doping ban that’s so long it ends her career, then she needs to deal with the real weakness in her game, which is her serve. Specifically, her toss is all over the place, which makes her serve very inconsistent and puts her under high stress during her service games. As we have spoken about at length with respect to our golf practice, centering gives the foundation for change by returning more fully to the present, rather than falling away into the past or future. For Sharapova, either the stress has become habitual (past focus), it stems from a worry that things could go wrong (future focus), or it’s a combination of both, but whatever it is, it’s corrupting her ball toss. A return to the present moment via centering would begin to shift that stress away. The ball toss could just be the ball toss.

For another example, consider Andy Murray. Murray tends to waste vast amounts of energy getting upset when things aren’t going his way in a match. He directs that energy toward the people in his player’s box. It got bad enough that his most recent coach, Amelie Mauresmo, with whom he had considerable success, admitted that their parting stemmed in part from the discomfort she felt being at the receiving end of his negativity during matches. (I can empathize; as a fan, it can be genuinely hard to watch.) Centering would allow him to experience the annoyance and frustration simply as they are, without needing to put more energy into them. It might also make him more aware of the effect he’s having on others.

A couple of things worth noting with respect to Murray: in last weekend’s final at Roland Garros, which Murray lost to Novak Djokovic, we saw very, very little of this habit. He did complain about a few things during the match, but those things–an interviewer in his player’s box during the match, seeing a cable-cam designed to look like an airplane in his peripheral vision while serving–seemed like fairly legitimate distractions. Of course, as Jerry spoke about in his piece from Tuesday, there are always distractions. The question is, how do we deal with them?

Also, the tenor of what Murray says during those spells matters a lot. Many, many tennis writers have discussed how singles tennis might be the loneliest of all sports–you’re separated from your opponent by both a substantial distance and a net. You’re not allowed any coaching. Whatever comes, you have to handle it all by yourself. When Murray is speaking things aloud but without the negativity, it may be a way to let go of that sense of aloneness, and thus be energetically worthwhile. He needs to learn to differentiate between practices that let go of negative energy and practices that soak in it.

Over the next week, consider ways that you could bring the awareness and flow brought by centering into problematic or at least energy-leaking habits in your own life.

Today I leave for Apogaea, the Colorado Regional Burning Man festival.

There’s a reason festivals like this have become so popular. There’s a reason Burning Man itself has grown from a population of a few thousand during its early years in the desert to something like 70,000 last year. At their best, festivals can be hugely energizing. I came back from my first Burning Man in 2005 and felt like I was glowing for months. My creativity surged. Whatever energy I put into that first Burn, I got back many times over. And that’s not an uncommon experience. The positive impact on one’s energy can be genuinely life-changing.

I’m not sure that experience is available to me any longer. We change and grow, and what was a clear net-positive at one point may be neutral or worse at another. So one intention I have going into Apogaea is to find the answer to this question: is it time for me to close this chapter in my life? The answer will be clear in terms of my energy on the other side of the event. The way I figure it, I come out ahead either way: either I get that charge again or else, by letting go, I free up energy for whatever’s to come next.

Yep, that’s really how many unread messages I have in the two inboxes I use for my less-personal email.

At some point, I discovered that I can let pretty much all of that email go by unnoticed without it costing me very much. So why not just delete all of it, every single message, unread? Well, unfortunately, it may not cost much, but it has a cost. A bit more often than I’d like, missing emails leads to me missing things I actually care about. I’ve missed concerts that I’d really like to see. I’ve missed some museum shows. Here and there I’ve missed a sale that would be useful to me. Things like that.

A while ago, my approach to email was to try to filter things into folders and deal with each in turn, but now I just let the stuff in those folders pile up, too. So my current “system” isn’t working, and it’s costing me energy and I’m missing enough things that matter that I want to do better.

In a not-dissimilar vein, I had an interesting experience this winter. It started in relation to clothing. Perhaps because I was in ski gear so much, I found myself rotating through only a small percentage of my winter clothing. Ultimately the conclusion was undeniable: I have more than I need.

And then one day, I was looking at my stuff again, and my thought to myself was a little different. It came out like this: “I need less than I have.” It took me a second to realize that I’d expressed something a bit more powerful. Yes, one possible meaning of that sentence is, “I have more than I need.” But the other, potentially more profound one is, “I need to have less.”

The more that I clear out clutter from my life, the more I realize how profound the stuck energy from such things really is.

Today is my birthday, and my present to myself for this year is a real focus on clearing out as much unnecessary stuff as I can manage, to let go, to discover ever more deeply the freedom and lightness of less. I’m going to start with goddamn email, and it’s going to feel great.

We had a deliciously eventful final weekend at Roland Garros. We got Serena and Novak in the respective finals, as expected. And we saw two very different outcomes.

This is now the third straight major that Serena hasn’t won. She’s still at 21 Major titles, one behind Steffi Graf. This quest seems to be grinding her down.

There was a major difference between her losses to Roberta Vinci and Angelique Kerber at the US Open and the Australian respectively, and her loss here to Garbiñe Muguruza. Both Vinci and Kerber played like they had nothing to lose, and there was a strong sense that Serena in substantial part beat herself.

Mugu didn’t play like she had nothing to lose. She played like she had something to win. From the way the match unfolded, from Garbiñe’s demeanor throughout, you’d think she was the favorite and Serena the upstart challenger.

In the US Open and the Australian, Serena lost. Here, she got beat.

On the men’s side, nerves caught Novak during the first set, and despite a strong beginning in which he broke Murray at love in the first game, Novak lost his first two service games to find himself down 4-1. From that point on, he settled down and began to impose himself. His movement on the court improved, and he began to turn defense into attack more regularly. He started taking control of points and putting Murray under stress. He wasn’t able to get the break back, but he changed the tenor of the match, and by the start of the second set he was firmly in control. But for a return of nerviness serving for the match at 5-2 in the fourth, and again for his first two match points at 5-4, he pretty much dismantled Andy Murray. He showed again that when he’s playing his best, no one can touch him.

And now the French Open is done. I’m gonna go ahead and say that I watched too much of it–being in front of the TV that much was not positive for my mental health. But based on my zero drafts and my notes, I think I have some solid material for a really interesting piece, something far more ambitious than anything I’ve published here so far. This one’s gonna take a while to write. Look for it sometime after the summer solstice.

Last week, I wrote about a day I spent fishing on the San Juan River and described how I had the most successful day I’d ever had by slowing down, paying attention, and then acting on what I observed.
I ended last week’s piece with a series of questions relating to what we’re doing here: “To what degree are the improvements in our golf game simply the willingness to slow down and pay attention as we practice? What is it that makes what we’re doing with TTW any different from what I did at the San Juan?”

Over the past week, I’ve put a lot of energy into those questions, and the answer I’ve come to is that essentially, it’s exactly that willingness to slow down and pay attention that’s driven our improvement. That is exactly what we are trying to do with TTW: to slow down and attend deeply to the moment, seeking to create a space where our rational mind and our intuitive self can engage with the task at hand and work together optimally instead of fighting each other. To feel our bodies as best we are able and to discern what happens moment by moment with as little judgment as possible. To bring a sense of play to our practice.

With the techniques at the heart TTW, we’re trying to create a ground for this to happen. That is what centering, this practice of bringing attention to the body and the breath, is all about. That day on the Juan, the circumstances were as they were, and I flowed with the river. On another day I might have succumbed to frustration, smacked my rod against the water, and broken the tip off. (How I know to offer that specific detail as indicative of frustration taking hold will be left as an exercise for the reader.)

The practice of centering is to give us an always-with-us, easily available means to access that state. For most of us most of the time, access into a calm, centered, flowing state happens at best haphazardly, during those few fleeting moments when our focus in some activity becomes just so. For many of us, it happens not at all.

Centering and related techniques offer the promise that this state–what has become popularly known as flow–can be accessed at will. More precisely–this is very important–flow is a skill that can be learned. It needs to be practiced. It gets easier to access as you work at it, and grows in depth as you practice. Like any other deep skill, it will meet your explorations of it with ever deeper rewards, and will still never become fully discovered. You will never exhaust that exploration.

Now think back to the story Jerry told about his client who speaks of the decline of her golf game but says that she doesn’t like to practice. What if we could convince her that practicing is fun? What might happen then?

How would we do that? It starts with centering. Centering brings your attention to the present moment, and the present moment, properly noticed, turns out to be fascinating. If she practiced centering as she practiced golf, and suddenly practicing golf became fun, what might happen with her golf game? More importantly: what might happen with her life in general?

On Tennis Channel they’re primarily showing Djokovic vs Berdych. On today’s slow, slow clay, Djokovic is still Djokovic, and even though Berdych is bigger and hits harder he can’t get the ball past Djokovic. The match isn’t especially compelling, as is all too often the case with a Djokovic match. The level is very high, as you’d expect, but by the third game of the first set the match takes on the air of inevitability that so many of Djokovic’s matches have. Soon enough, Djokovic has taken the first two sets in that hard-working-yet-comfortable way he dispatches almost everyone ranked higher than, say, 20 but below maybe four.

At the same time, on Suzanne Lenglen, we have David Goffin, from Belgium, 22 years old, ranked thirteenth in the world, versus Dominic Thiem, 19 years old, from Austria, ranked fifteenth in the world. It’s the first Slam quarterfinal for either of them. Tomorrow one of them will play in a Slam semi-final for his first time. The winner, the announcers add, will for the first time in his career crack the top 10. When the broadcast cuts in to the match, you watch a little and conclude that it won’t be long for the loser to reach that milestone as well.

Thiem holds a break at 4-3 in the first set, but loses the final three games to lose 6-4. They cut back to Djokovic-Berdych. Thiem gives up an early break in the second, they announce. When they cut back to Goffin-Thiem, it’s 5-3. Thiem breaks, wins his serve, has a good shot for a second break to make it 6-5 but fails, and then wins his service game to force the tiebreaker. The quality of play is very high and the match has become very exciting to watch. They certainly aren’t cutting away now.

Thiem now is putting everything into not going down two sets to zero. He is hitting harder than I have ever seen anyone hit. Goffin looks like the Roadrunner when he runs, and he gets everything. Thiem hits even harder and Goffin keeps retrieving. Thiem takes a 5-2 lead, then drops the next three points. He earns himself set point at 6-5, then loses two to face set point against at 6-7 but on his serve. Goffin defends so well that soon it is Goffin on the attack, he has moved up to net, and Thiem throws up a soaring desperation lob that lands just inside the baseline. Goffin hits a curling overhead deep but to Thiem’s forehand side, and Thiem takes it like it’s on a tee, ripping the ball down the line so hard you swear you see it blue-shift, and even still somehow Goffin manages to get a racquet to it. Goffin’s shot doesn’t land in play but even so that’s two amazing things on the same shot, Thiem’s pace and Goffin’s reaction and quickness.

This shot of Thiem’s, over the highest part of the net at set point against, they measure at 101 miles per hour.

At 7-7 he hits another forehand down the line, this one measuring 103 miles per hour. This one not even Goffin can get to.

Now it’s set point for Thiem on Goffin’s serve at 7-8, and Thiem continues hitting the ball like it hurt his family, and finally a shot of Goffin’s flies long and Thiem wins the set. Still, though, it feels like Thiem’s victory in this moment will be pyrrhic. He’s been hitting this hard because it’s taken everything he has to push Goffin off-balance at all. There’s no pleasure in it, no sense that he’s thrilling in what he’s capable of. The dominant emotion coming from him is during the tiebreaker is desperation. He mustn’t, simply must not, go down two sets to zero. And he doesn’t. When it’s over, instead of celebration, there is only relief.

This: this is why I watch. Neither Thiem nor Goffin may thrill in it, but I do. For these sixteen points they have played like the whole world is at stake, and I get to witness it.

Today was sunny and warm and lovely here in Boulder, but I nevertheless found myself struggling under a very low mood, and while there’s probably a solid explanation for it and within that explanation some strong suggestions for some short-term changes I should make in my approach to things, I am instead entertaining this thought: “What if I am under this very low mood because I have been watching so much of the French Open, and over the course of this tournament Paris has been suffering through some very oppressive skies?”

“Gay Paris?” I laugh, bitterly. “More like dismal Paris.”

I’ve watched many hours of the French so far, and it’s been enjoyable, but what stood out during the early rounds is how impossible it is to watch everything. There are 128 players in each of the men’s and women’s draws. That means there are 128 total first-round matches, another 64 in the second round, 32 more in the third. So what do you choose? How do you guide yourself through the tournament so that you maximize your chances of seeing something remarkable and, if not remarkable, at least beautiful?

It’s Memorial Day, and the choice between writing a lot and not writing a lot came down to the choice between having a beer and not having a beer. Having a beer won, because America is a land of champions.