Free Refills

Today I’m resurrecting my soccerblog, which is cleverly entitled Ben Writes About Soccer. Real Madrid hired Zinedine Zidane as their manager, and I had to write about it. You can read the piece here: Watch Out, Zizou, That Chick Is Crazy.

Today’s piece is on Training Tiger Woods. You’ll find it here.

This is Mango.

Everybody loves Mango.

I made a website about Mango. You can find it at everybodylovesmango.freerefills.net. You might as well bookmark that URL and put it in your RSS reader and stuff, because let’s face it, you’re going to be checking it out all the time.

Mango is an old girl now, about 14-and-a-half, but she’s still one of the greatest dogs ever, and I’m going to celebrate her in the late autumn of her years.

(Anyway, Free Refills is my website and no one can stop me.)

She’s my sweet girl and I’m going to make sure that everyone knows it. It’s going to be super-popular, Mango’s website. Why? Because everybody loves Mango.

Wait. Breathing?

Yup. This isn’t widely known, but breathing was something that had to be invented. It didn’t just happen. The first organisms complicated enough to need to breathe all died of suffocation. They would be born and they would flop around in painful misery for a few minutes and then they would die. But one day, one of them had this great idea. She was flopping around, dying, and she thought, I wonder what would happen if I did this, and she consciously flexed a proto-muscle that previously hadn’t seemed to have any purpose, and that proto-muscle turned out to be a proto-diaphragm, and flexing that muscle filled her proto-lungs, and she breathed, and she stopped flopping around dying and suddenly the world was a much more pleasant and less painful place. You can imagine how thrilled she was. And she turned to all the other creatures flopping around dying there on the shores of primordial seas and she said, “Hey, try this!” and she taught them how to breathe. And they all agreed that breathing was a fantastic idea, that it made life a lot more pleasantly compelling than flopping around dying ever was, and they all hailed her idea, and set about the process of evolving and filling up the planet with life.

She had no name–the idea of names wouldn’t be invented for many hundred millions of years–but we should all raise a glass in her honor. For breathing was a truly great idea.

So how great an idea is it?

A similarly great idea was the invention of breathing.

How great an idea is it?

Let’s put this great idea into the context of great ideas. The Internet was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than the Internet. Recorded music was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than recorded music. Quantum mechanics was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than quantum mechanics.

How about the bicycle? Pizza? Written language?

Great ideas all, but this idea far transcends them.

It all started with a great idea.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that it’s kind of silly how seriously I take the deadlines I give myself. The day I finished this piece, I got up at 3:30am to make sure that I’d get all my writing done ahead of my little sabbatical. The deadline is wholly self-created. Perhaps I’m taking myself a little too seriously?

I thought about it more and, while I’m willing to consider that my time-management skills need a little work, it hit me: it’s not silly to take the promises I make to myself and myself alone seriously. That has a name. It’s called integrity.

Our lives are very short. I don’t want to get too pie-in-the-sky here but our lives are very short. Recently I was talking with my little sister and she was saying that she’s soon to turn forty. My kid sister will soon turn forty. It was a big enough deal when I hit forty, but shouldn’t my baby sister still be, like, sixteen? Like, forever?

I remember lying on the grass in the park on sunny summer afternoons when I was a kid, lying in the shade and staring up at the fluffy white clouds with a friend and describing what we saw there, telling stories about monsters and dragons floating above us, cottony white within that magnificent azure expanse. We felt like those afternoons would last forever. Each day was a year.

And now we are much older, and sometimes it feels like each year is merely a day.

Constriction is appealing because…well, because it keeps us safe, in a sense. We know these boundaries. We know this place with all its clutter. And sure, we are not fully happy, not fully realized, and we know it, but to let go of the things that we use to hold us back–and that’s what it is, holding ourselves back, clutching these things, grasping–it scares us. It scares us because we identify these things as ourselves.

I remember from the early days of my working with Jerry the feeling of a huge energy flow as I began to let go of things, and I finally understood the proscription often stated in texts on kundalini or tantra, that you should not undertake these practices without a teacher, because you might go crazy. I always read that stuff and said, “Yeah, sure,” while at the same time wondering, “Really? Is that possible?” But then I had the experience of an energetic awakening and I remember vividly going to Jerry one day and responding to his question of, “How are things?” by saying, “They’re going well. I mean, I feel like I’m dissolving, but besides that, they’re going really well.”

In opening–in spaciousness–things that you took as part and parcel of yourself turn out not to be. You are something else than you thought you were. What, then, are you?