The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

by Shawn Green

For most of us, our awareness becomes trapped within our heads. We are so lost in the fantasies of our minds—egoistic images of who we think we are or should be—that we fail to truly experience the world around us.

Perfection is not the point. Rather, the key is to catch yourself early when you lose perspective. Meditating daily, we observe our minds, our egos, and our emotions from a distance, learning to watch ourselves as witnesses, no longer drowning in thoughts or emotions.

The difference between reacting and responding is subtle, but immense.

To become responsive, I had to move my awareness off the surface, to move deeper. This was not limited to baseball, but applied to my life off the field as well. Like many of us, I had falsely believed that the superficial dramas of my daily life defined who I was. Lost in my own story, I was like an actor who thought the character he was playing was reality.

The mind is closed and rigid, fixated on its desires; it manipulates all perceptions to fit into the paradigm it has created. Awareness, on the other hand, is open and fluid and offers a path to what is real.

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

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.

All we can do is chop wood each day, and make adjustments as needed, and remain nonresistant to life.

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

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.

Might simply being aware of the ego and watching it from a place of separation and space be enough to keep oneself present?

“The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided … never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

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.

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

The best approach to the game of baseball is just to play it; the same is true of life.

(Many authority figures are great at talking, opining, and giving directions, but are incompetent when it comes to truly hearing others. Often, their minds are so preoccupied formulating responses that they don’t actually listen to what’s being said. Whereas talking to a good listener—one who absorbs every word and refrains from cutting you off with his or her own words—is a great experience.)

Whereas talking to a good listener—one who absorbs every word and refrains from cutting you off with his or her own words—

baseball changes fast. It’s futile to try to hold onto the past.

From time to time, we all need to get inside the monster in our lives before we can emerge into the bright lights.