Free Refills

T-minus eleven days and counting.

I’ve recently been a bit demoralized that I haven’t seen the changes I seek in my own life come more fully into fruition. There’s been a lot of struggle. Apparently I’m still dealing with unexplored blocks.

But if I were teaching myself, I’d like to think that I’d notice my student’s wounded morale and point out that perception and reality might not be exactly the same thing.

“How is the writing going?” Teacher Ben might ask.

“A lot of volume,” Student Ben might respond. “Not very sure about the quality.”

“But you are zero-drafting? And seeing interesting things pop up?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve said that with respect to your skiing, you’ve seen yourself jump a couple of levels this winter, that your flow has expanded radically.”

“Yes.”

As a good teacher in this situation, maybe all I’d do is maintain a significant silence. Perhaps raise an eyebrow. As in: draw your own conclusions.

T-minus twelve days and counting.

Let’s try this on for size:

I have something important to offer.

I have skills and a track record. I’ve taught centering and energy awareness to ski students and seen startling improvements. I helped a high-level amateur tennis player improve her serve markedly in fifteen minutes. I can see and describe blocks to flow in even the most accomplished athletes.

Furthermore, the foundation for my teaching is that I am a student of flow. I understand the benefits of this work, the potential inherent within it, and the challenges one might come across, because I walk this path every single day.

T-minus fifteen days and counting.

When I talk about this trip, I find myself struggling to express my goals in a way that’s not self-undermining. I tell friends and family that I essentially seek to take my coaching business not from zero to sixty but, like, zero to six hundred, and I sound apologetic to my own ears, like I believe my goals are wholly unrealistic.

On the one hand, I have to recognize that the public evidence of my abilities is, well, the stories I tell on Free Refills. I have no reputation in this space at all. That’s just a fact. But if that’s all I tell the universe, the universe will surely affirm that belief, and I will fail. Somehow, I have to learn to acknowledge the facts as they are now, and at the same time follow it with a full-hearted expression that I know I have something important to offer.

If you could see how much of a struggle I’m having writing this piece, you’d know how much of a struggle finding this expression is for me.

At the heart of this struggle lies my fear, right? I’m scared as hell. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, I am.

T-minus sixteen days and counting.

I finished moving out of my ex-house in Boulder late last June. I’ve had a bit more than nine months now to focus on building my new life, and I struggle to feel like I have much to show for it. People who love me feed back to me that I’ve done a lot of growing, so I take some heart in their opinions, but, well, sometimes it’s hard not to say, “Personal growth plus a subway token will get you onto the subway.”

I certainly believed that I’d be a lot further along with building my career than I am now. The honest truth is that I’m terrified that I won’t succeed, and I’m even more terrified that I will–fear of success is way scarier than fear of failure. As I’ve written many times on Free Refills, it’s far easier to stay stuck in a place you know, no matter how miserable you are there, than it is to move boldly into something different. You know this place of stuckness. You feel safe here. You know you can survive here, because you’ve been doing it for so long. Everything is under control.

To move forward, I will have to let go of everything I know about myself and my life. I will have to relinquish that control.

I have read this advice uncountably many times: When in doubt, act “as if.” I’m taking a huge plunge with this trip, because I’m trying to act as if I’ve fully embodied the belief that not only do I have something to offer, but that I can express it well enough that others will see it.

I’m scared as hell. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, I am.

I leave for Europe in seventeen days and I have just begun to plan. As I write this, I haven’t yet made sleeping arrangements in any city in which I’m staying. Shit, besides the cities where the tennis tournaments are, I haven’t even decided all the places I’m traveling to.

The last time I traveled solo internationally was when I went to Spain back in college. Back then, my planning was … minimal. I often flew by the seat of my pants. You know what? Things tended to work out okay. But I’m almost twenty-fives years older now–that’s a lot of time in which to ossify.

But with only seventeen days left to go, I’m clearly gonna have to approach things to some degree as I did back then. Intellectually, I know it’s going to be okay–this is Western Europe that I’m traveling to. It’s not like I’m going somewhere where if I forget to pack something, I might die.

I know that intellectually. I’m nevertheless scared as hell. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, I am.

I leave for Europe in eighteen days. I’ll be there for just over seven weeks as I follow the ATP and WTA tennis tours through a substantial part of the clay-court season. I’ll to be at the tournaments in Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome, before finishing up in Paris at Roland Garros.

The goal for the trip is to put energy and intention into the belief that I have something substantial to offer as a coach of flow to athletes at that level, and hope the universe responds.

Do I fully have that self-belief. No, I’m scared as hell. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, I am.

This comes from a zero draft in which I attempted to write about the broader social significance of the popularity of Game of Thrones. The piece never came to fruition, but when I came across this paragraph, I had to smile.

Some might object that the word I use, nerd, should actually be geek. Feel free to do a little mental find and replace if you feel that way.

At this point in my life I’m pretty adept at passing as a normal person, but really I’ve always been and will always be a nerd, and for me and all of those like me, there’s a certain vindication when nerd culture rises in prominence and becomes an important piece of the greater conversation, and big-time popular entertainment in the fantasy/sci-fi world is always our crowning moment. “It’s our world now, bitches,” we cry out, shaking our puny but dexterous (for we are excellent typists) little fists.

A bit of wisdom about dealing with challenging situations/patterns in relationship.

When someone cares about you and is reflecting you back to yourself, you ignore that reflection at your peril, no matter how distorted that reflection may be. Your job, of course, is to try to see the undistorted image as best you can, but remember this: the easiest person of all to fool is yourself.

In the three years since I wrote what follows about the social significance of perceiving energy, I’ve only distanced myself further from accepting the consensus view of how the world works.

This admittedly brings up some fear. In trusting that viewpoint, how do you avoid devolving into alienation or worse with the rest of the world? You know–“Oh, when will these poor benighted people come to their senses!”

I see it this way: energy awareness is like bringing color to a world that had previously been seen only in black and white. Given how vastly better my life has become since my awakening into the reality of energy flow, a vast potential for a change for the better exists in our world, as more and more people have the opportunity to finally see the world in color.

It’s a funny thing when you start having experiences that you realize (a) are actually happening and (b) you can’t talk about with just anyone because you’ll sound crazy. And it’s true, too, that sometimes you’ll feel crazy. Because what’s the evidence that (a) is true? Your subjective experience? Isn’t trusting your subjective experience over the consensus reality of those around one of the signs of craziness?

And yet I have no doubt that what I’m experiencing is, in fact, there to be experienced. It’s not a crazy piece of mind-created nonsense. That not everyone perceives it so directly … well, that’s just how it is. If you’ve ever listened to music with a highly skilled musician and heard her describe to you things that you cannot hear until they’re pointed out, or maybe cannot hear at all–subtle gradations of intonation, for example–you might have a sense of what kind of perceiving I’m talking about. What she hears is there to be heard. You just haven’t developed the skills to hear it.

As I’ve published bits and pieces from my old zero drafts, and especially as I put up the excerpts from that old notebook over the past four days, I feel that in those older drafts I am seeing higher quality writing than what I’ve been doing recently.

In order to not make myself crazy, I need to treat this as a testable proposition and keep reading over the zero drafts and see what I think as I approach the present day.

So has my technique actually degraded over these past three years? This prospect genuinely scares me, for obvious reasons. But if that’s the case, then what do I do about it? Because I have experienced, again and again, the value of trusting the zero drafts.

What occurs to me is that, if there has been a degradation of technique, it’s not the fault of the zero draft process. It’s that, because of my deadlines, I have tended to z.d. with most of my attention toward getting a piece out quickly rather than doing a pure zero draft. That is, all the zero drafts are to a certain extent first drafts, and first drafts and zero drafts are meant to do different things.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next several months as I deepen my primary focus toward larger-scale writing.