Keeping one’s balance
The last month was certainly one of reaching many goals. Yet what martial arts training reinforces with its Zen underpinnings is the concept of balance, that within every victory is a bit of loss, within the dark is a spot of light.
The following is from Clearing Away Clouds; Nine Lessons for Life from the Martial Arts by Stephen Fabian:
The soft and yielding yin must be balanced by a hard, forceful yang. Patience must be balanced by perseverance, the active principle of continually putting one foot before the other. Inevitably, you will stumble while on your Way.” p. 125
As the pace picked up and I didn’t take the time to metaphorically catch my breath, sooner rather than later my body stopped responding to the internal call of more, now, faster, harder, just once more… After fifty trips around the sun, you’d think I’d know this by now. So when my back bucked and my knee buckled, anxious to maintain the mind-body balance while recuperating, I’ve read a lot to keep up the engagement quotient.
Here are a few passages that took me back to playing fields of a lifetime ago and the search for the coach who cares more about the kids than winning. Michael Lewis, the wonderful author of many award-winning titles, went back to his high school in New Orleans (the same school from which the Manning boys hailed), to re-connect with his former baseball coach as controversy surrounded him. His words capture it better than mine: Coach; Lessons on the Game of Life by Michael Lewis
HE WILL NEVER BE A TOUGH COMPETI-TOR. HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH BEING UNCOMFORT-ABLE: quote from Lou Pinella p 54
“By ‘it’ he did not mean the importance of winning or even, exactly, of trying hard. … ‘It’ was the importance of battling one’s way through all the easy excuses life offered for giving up.” p 54
“Fitz’s office wasn’t the office of a coach who wanted others to know of his many triumphs. There were no trophies or plaques, though he had won enough of them to fill five offices. Other than a few old newspaper clips about his four children, now grown, there were few mementos. What he did keep was books—lots of them.” p 55
“…some of them will never understand the responsibility they have to their teams and themselves…He was running an organization that , like the Franciscan order or the Marine Corps, depended on a more difficult system of values than that of the greater society.” p 62
“What it means to be a man was that you struggled against your natural instinct to run away from adversity.” p 77
“We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonderful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both. What he knew—and I’m not sure he’d ever consciously thought it, but he knew it all the same—was that we’d never conquer the weaknesses within ourselves. We’d never drive the worst of ourselves away for good. We’d never win. The only glory to be had would be in the quality of the struggle.” p 82-83
“One of the goodies about athletics is you get to find out if you can stretch. If you can get better. But you got to push.” p 87
“ ‘Do you really thing there’s any hope for this team?’ The question startled him into a new freshness. He was alive, awake, almost well again. ‘Always,’ he said. ‘You never give up on a team. Just like you never give up on a kid.’ Then he pauses. ‘But it’s going to take some work.’ ” p 90
Tags: , baseball, Michael Lewis, yin and yang