jaeleslie

We've been watching the Olympics lately. My friend Chris who is also a calligrapher and painter and writer asked in email, "How does one get one's mind to behave? and even be able to focus and shrug off failures (like gymnast Paul Hamm). I want to have that I can do it attitude. Do you think it's a constant struggle?"

A couple nights ago we saw the interviewer ask Paul Hamm about the hoo-hah over the all-around gold medal, and he said it was the first he'd heard of it. Since then apparently the reporters have plagued him and worried him about it. The men's gymnastics was even more dramatic tonight, and if you watched you saw her ask him the same question again, and it was really so much more of a big deal tonight, because the judges really screwed up bigtime! He had had to wait around for his turn on the high bar and then go sit down for a while waiting and then start it with the audience still booing the judges even after the nice Russian gymnast (who was robbed!) told them very nicely to sit down and shut up. I was so unimpressed with that interviewer Andrea something. Sports interviewers always ask athletes these philosophical questions that athletes really shouldn't be expected to answer. Then the athletes have to say something safe and at best pretty uninteresting. Get a brain, Andrea, I said. (Yeah, I talk to the television, it is very Fahrenheit 451 around here.)

While we were watching the track & field stuff I asked Mr S about Chris' question, because I had no idea myself. He is something of an athlete himself. So I asked him, how do they focus like that? from the point of view of a creative person. And he said, number one, athletes are not creative people: they simplify things pretty radically. These people we are watching have the one thing in their life, which is running, or swimming, or whatever, that is their focus. (There was no number two. Mr S tends to simplify things pretty radically.)

You can see it when the gymnasts for example are getting ready to do their thing. Someone else is off on the other part of the gym with their floor exercise music, and they are completely not paying attention to that, or to the crowd yelling about the guy on the rings, or anything else. I get so exasperated when the announcers speculate about What could be going through their minds? because obviously, they are thinking about their routine! Tunnel vision. We are watching with monkey minds jumping to every different thought that comes by, and the announcers feed that with their speculations.

And then someone (those announcers! honestly!) said something about how the good athletes have to follow their coach's instructions. I thought that might be a clue, that when you are twenty-something it is probably a good thing to follow coach's instructions. But then Mr S, who has known quite a few coaches (some of his best friends are coaches), said there is really not a lot of instruction about it. Kind of like horses following instructions, they are not following the text very well. The athletes' main thing is not the instructions, it's just doing what they do naturally. The runners just run, the swimmers swim, the gymnasts jump around -- like those Hamm boys did in the barn in Waukesha, playing.

So I come back to the same old answer, that for Chris and me it is a problem of finding something that we do as naturally as fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and little monkey boys gotta climb around the barn rafters. Not much thinking involved, just natural born fun.

Then practice practice practice. They don't just make up those fancy high-bar routines on the spur of the moment, however easy they make it look, they have done the exact same thing a zillion times before.

But I think some sort of meditative practice is probably a good thing for the focus part. I am really not in a position to advise anyone about finding a single focus for one's energies! I have to make do with paying very close attention to each thing in turn as it comes up. In eastern religions there is much made of how to quiet all the inner hubbub and worry, the monkey mind that is so easily distracted.

Or maybe that is what the FlyLady is getting at with her Routines. Installing the Automatic Pilot. If the routine
stuff is part of daily life -- then the fire is ready laid when the spark comes. You want that I Can Do It attitude, so you practice your affirmations, and shrug off your defeats, which is not easy, and get back to the really interesting stuff that you want to focus on. It is more fun anyway.

"Making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures"

Staying up late writing phisolophickle emails is my kind of fun!