The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

by Shawn Green

ego, a term I use here to mean “one’s consciousness of one’s own identity,” rather than “an inflated feeling of pride in one’s superiority to others.”

“All I need is one more home run, and then I’ll be happy.”

Bad things happen when one’s attention slips away.

Be yourself … Don’t feel like you need to live up to anything you’ve done in the past, and don’t feel like you need to live up to the expectations everyone has for you in the future. Just play the game.

I had read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse many times and thought now of Siddhartha’s words: “Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” I needed to live it.

but chasing home runs is anathema to finding a good groove—a hitter’s stride gets jumpy and his swing gets both faster and slower. That’s right, faster and slower! How is that possible? Everything the home run obsessed hitter does, beginning with the stride, becomes rushed, until you’re jumping out to meet the ball almost before the pitcher releases it. Inevitably, you chase a lot of bad pitches. Additionally, when you try too hard to hit for distance, you often rely on your upper body rather than your legs to generate the power. Subsequently, the path of the swing becomes longer and so, even as your body moves more rapidly, the bat actually moves more slowly.

Analyzing players by numerical comparison is inescapable. And whether one swings a bat for a living, sells widgets for a corporation, or is a high school student hoping to score high on the SATs, analysis and comparisons are inevitable and not without value. Numbers aren’t the problem. The problem is losing oneself in numbers.

(The ego lives only in the past and future, never in the present.)

But money and pressure weren’t the real causes of my depression. The trouble arose because my ego tricked me into believing that “You’ll only be happy when you live up to all the expectations, just down the road …”

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The enlightened are distinguished from the rest of us not by the work they do but by the manner in which they do their work.

(How many of us are able to become as fully engaged in our activities as is a child?) No matter how much life wisdom a person acquires, the chores of daily life remain the same. The enlightened, however, do not do their daily work as a mere means to an end: The chopping of the wood is not done for the purpose of building a fire, the carrying of the water is not done for the purpose of cooking food, because everything is done in the same state of presence, for its own sake, without goals. That was how I used to approach my tee work.

Importante

The habit of being lost in goals and desires was not easy to break.

back—that swing is coming, all on its own!” “Tony always told me that same thing,” I said. “If you come off your back foot too soon, then your body no longer pulls the bat through the zone with same force. Instead, your hands just drift forward toward the pitcher prematurely.”

Playing with close friends made baseball feel more like Little League, like a game.

I realized now that after moving away from friendships in Toronto my performance became my sole focus. In Los Angeles, I had a job to do, period. Where is the joy in that? Where is the spirit of the eight-year-old I’d met at the batting cages? It’s no way to approach a job. No way to approach anything!

You can’t find a spiritual connection if your body can’t stay present!

Often, when our bodies and lives are working perfectly, we take the present moment for granted and get lost in our minds and egos. However, when we suffer an injury or get sick, the body pulls us back by drawing our attention to our pain, which inevitably resides in the present moment. This is why in some monasteries monks are taught to raise their hands during meditation if they grow too connected to their thoughts. The master then comes over and whacks them on their backs with a stick in order to create a painful sensation, which knocks their attention away from their thoughts and back to their bodies.

Whenever awareness is placed in the body, presence emerges.

Usually, injuries and illnesses occur when we are lost in time and least capable of being in the moment. Perhaps injuries, illnesses, and failures are sometimes our bodies’ way of telling us that it’s time to refocus our attention.

It takes discipline to remain present. Before I lost it, I took it for granted. I embarked on the new season as a more grateful and humble person.

You can’t force a flower to bloom or fruit to ripen on the vine; it needs to happen when it is supposed to happen.

Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty … until I was dripping sweat and couldn’t take another hack. It was during those last swings, when I was too exhausted to think anymore about my mechanics, that I’d lose my mind and find my way back to the present moment, where impatience for results doesn’t exist.

Becoming attached to success is just as dangerous as becoming attached to failure.

Importante

Working as a team in adverse circumstances (without our number three and five hitters) had evoked a sense of camaraderie as well as a sense of responsibility. I once again felt like a player my teammates could rely on. It felt great.

As a Blue Jay, my ego would jump in to take the credit for my success as if I’d done something great. Now, I knew that there wasn’t any doing with which to credit myself; instead, there was only allowing. My job as a wiser hitter was just to take my swings with the proper balance, separation, space, and presence. I needed to do this as my daily, disciplined routine without any further motive or purpose. By creating this environment, I allowed it to show up. I didn’t will it to show up, but allowed it. If it never showed up, I like to think that would have been okay too and I’d have kept on with the daily work regardless. But it did show up and in a big way.

Pride serves as a warning that we are connecting to our egos, which we should only ever do with full awareness.

Of course, it may seem that with all the experimentation, discovery, analysis, and practice I’d already devoted to hitting, I should have permanently conquered its technical aspects by now. But that wasn’t so and could never be. Like every other complex activity, hitting is dynamic, which is what makes it not only a continual challenge but a great teacher. Besides, no one’s body or awareness is ever 100 percent the same from one at-bat to the next; similarly, no two pitches are ever truly identical. Thus the act of hitting, like life, is always a work in progress. One must master a skill, and then master it again in a different way for new circumstances, on and on … Yes, sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s always enlivening and ultimately beautiful. So, it was back to work on the stride.

It takes discipline to keep your eyes on process rather than on results.

The only real way to exercise any control of the zone is to simply be prepared for its arrival.

When we practice our daily chores without ulterior motives, a routine becomes like the rubbing together of two sticks; if you keep at it fire eventually happens. You don’t know exactly when it will arrive—it just does.

Achieving the state of no-mind is the key to getting into the zone and sustaining that state is key to staying there for as long as possible.

Nothing feels better than exhaustion after a full day absorbed in the moment.

Finishing up this journal marks the end of today’s historic game. When I move back a few rows to where the guys are anxious for me to join their card game, I will have officially let go of patting myself on the back. My ego would love to live in this day forever, but the truth is it’s over. All that matters is right now, sitting here on the plane.

The truth is that while I was in the zone, I moved beyond the whole competition aspect of hitting. Absorbed in the act, it no longer mattered to me what team I was playing against or who was on the mound. There was only this: The ball came at me in slow motion, and I hit it. As the pitcher released the ball there was no me, no him, no bat, and no ball. All nouns were gone, leaving only one verb: to hit.

In sports, if one player is competing and the other has transcended competition, who’s going to win? The answer is obvious. A lot of people talk about the best players being those who compete best. They talk about players whose minds are toughest. They reason that whoever wants it more will win. Yes, there’s a time and a place for this mentality, but it was never what I was after (I relied on it only when I was off my game). What I preferred was to be effortless. Meditation and presence during my daily routines aided me in this. Still, I was never in control of the zone. Rather, it passed through me as it pleased. I was only its vehicle. Top athletes play a different game than others. They have a knack for being in the zone, whether they can explain it or not. These athletes are fun to watch, not just because of their ability to win but because of the grace and presence of their actions.

The zone isn’t something that can be controlled. It is a force of nature—a force of the universe. It shows up when it shows up, and it comes packaged in an infinite number of ways. A great afternoon at the beach with friends, a belly laugh with your kids, and a deep conversation are all examples of it showing up. You can try to plan these moments or try to recreate them at a later date, but they can rarely be controlled or anticipated. Still, we live for moments like these. In the end, all you can really do to ensure them is absorb yourself fully in every moment and be patient. By doing so, the Zone will arrive more frequently in your life, work, and activities than ever before.

Zona importante

Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade. In 2000, I’d fallen into the ego’s trap of, “you need to be the hero,” and now that I’d injured my shoulder, I’d fallen into the ego’s new trap of being the unappreciated antisuperstar. The fight is never ending. Was my immoderate labeling of the ego as an evil enemy where I’d gone wrong? After all, the problem is not the ego itself, which is almost impossible to permanently quash, but getting lost in the ego and falsely identifying it as one’s own true essence. Might simply being aware of the ego and watching it from a place of separation and space be enough to keep oneself present? I realized now that I’d doubtless get lost in the ego again—many times—but that as long as I was able to wake up to the present moment I’d always find my way back. Just recognizing the ego for what it is means that you’re not completely lost in it.

This realization helped me to understand a quote from Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, “The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided … never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

Within a couple of days, the shot took effect and my pain was much relieved and much of my power returned. In the remaining twenty-four games of the season, I had twenty-three RBIs and seven homers and ended the season with a .280 average, 19 home runs, 85 RBIs, and a league-leading 49 doubles. While those numbers were a far cry from the 40-plus homers I’d hit in each of the previous two years, this season was among the most significant of my career, not because of numbers, but because it had exposed to me yet another layer of my ego—a layer that I likely would never have noticed without the injury—and taught me that the more I self-consciously resisted its pull, the more I became attached to the suspect identity that formed in the resistance. I learned acceptance of what is. A place of no judgment, no goals … the place where actual life happens. And that is a much better place to be.

I was finished trying to live up to an image of who I wanted to be or who I thought I was. It is all too easy for any of us to get lost in such manufactured images. Often, the perceptions and expectations of those around us strengthen the weighty images of ourselves we already carry around. Habitually, we label ourselves and others, and before long these labels create a false sense of identity that we spend far too much of our energy trying to justify. Sometimes we habitually identify ourselves with our jobs, our possessions, our goals; other times we habitually identify ourselves with our problems, our frustrations, our illnesses, our weaknesses. Better to just be where you are, to just feel what you feel.

It felt good to hit that homer, but it felt even better to make a decision that was aligned with my heart rather than with my ego.

And so, for better or worse, there was a lot about the 2004 season that fell short of my expectations about Dodgerland; one thing about allowing yourself to acknowledge your emotions as they arise: Sometimes, it hurts.

When you peel away the layers of the ego and subdue your expectations regarding how the world should be, then what’s left? Only life itself.

We all have voids in our lives. What makes the world interesting and fun are the often eccentric and always diverse ways we fill those voids. What a beautiful tapestry this makes of life.

As I looked at the different lockers, I’d be reminded how the players in this camp, and every big league camp, also made up a tapestry of diverse strands. Every team consists of players of different nationalities who speak numerous languages, players of different races from every possible economic background, players in their late thirties with growing families who are putting the finishing touches on their long careers, players who are not yet old enough to buy a beer, pranksters, and quiet, reserved guys. Of the sixty or so players at any spring training camp, many never get to the Major Leagues. Others hang on for a few years and only get a taste of their dreams. Few ever actually experience the wealth and fame that those on the outside assume is the norm for those on the inside. Still, in the clubhouse, differences between players weren’t the most important thing. What always mattered most was that we wore the same uniform and played the same game.

Spring training takes us all back several decades, to a time when the empty spaces between the pitches and the swings of the bat were just as important as the pitching and hitting itself, where the space between the actions is just as beautiful as the action itself.

Top athletes get kudos for being fierce competitors. Yet, when I looked at the most accomplished players in sports, I rarely saw wise, happy people. Instead, I more often saw insecure and miserable egos.

The best approach to the game of baseball is just to play it; the same is true of life. The most fulfilled people are the ones who are always playing, the ones who don’t take life too seriously.

That’s one of the things that I love about baseball, one of the things that I love about life: there is no end to the learning. Or teaching. I hoped that someday I’d show up at a stadium or a Little League field and have the same positive impact on a younger person that Tony always had on me. As significant as his hitting advice was, it was his desire to help, his display of friendship, which meant the most.