Play better than the calls

It’s football season. After several decades of living in Buffalo, I’ve finally started to take interest. Slowly I’m learning the nuances and rules, and I get the basics. However, I certainly don’t have the mental agility yet to see the fouls as they happen. Nevertheless, I can clearly see how a mistake or a call the ref’s make can alter the course of a game, especially if the team’s position on the score board is tenuous. My watching mate and football teacher, my sweetheart Dane, says, “The team has to play better than the bad calls.” But isn’t that life?

Sometimes in the morning I might waste a few (too many) minutes scrolling, and find myself pinched for time getting out the door to get to work. If nothing goes wrong I’ll make it to my next engagement on time. But if I break a glass on the kitchen floor or spill tea on the carpet or cut myself and need to deal with that unexpected mishap, I might be late. When I don’t leave early enough to get somewhere, and there’s an accident or construction along the way, I’ll be late; I’ll cause myself the anxiety of lateness and inconvenience someone else. This is me not ‘playing better than the calls’, that’s hoping nothing will go wrong and I’ll get there just in time to be on time. No doubt you can conjure a few areas of your life that you don’t ‘play better than the calls’.

While massaging a client’s very tight keyboard shoulders and neck the other day, we talked about the challenge she has doing the stretching she needs to keep herself out of pain at her new desk job. I thought about how much better my body feels in my strenuous physical job if I do the yoga poses that help my body maintain its fluidity. I realized trying to administer the self-care we need so the lifestyles we’re leading don’t take a physical and mental toll is ‘playing better than the calls.’ Today I worked with a client with some significant scoliosis, but she doesn’t experience too much pain and she does do conditioning exercise and regular stretching – she’s playing better than the calls.

Living in a body is tricky. Having a mind... well, you know... it’s not always easy up there. Dane hasn’t read any yoga scriptures so he doesn’t know about Patanjali’s yoga sutras so he doesn’t know about sutra 2.16 – one of my favorites. Loosely translated it says that the suffering or sorrow that could come should be avoided (meaning, play better than the calls). Patanjali discusses the main strategies to do this; first it’s important to realize the root afflictions that cause the suffering.

Football players and teams train hard, learn plays, learn each other’s play styles and adapt together, create physical and mental agility, work on their short comings, improve their skills, learn about their opponents and more, in hopes of winning, which is made easier with fewer flags on the field. In developing Self readiness for the game of life, the student of life and Self development does the same; learns the causes of short comings that cause suffering, overcomes the subconscious addictions to the feelings the shortcoming cause, and create new inner and outer strategies to mitigate or prevent the sorrow that could come otherwise. Of course Patanjali advocates for the yogic practices, namely, meditation and connection to the divine. Life will get wobbly. Obstacles will occur, tragedies might befall, glasses will break and politics will tick. Jobs will ask a toll on the body, on the mind, on time. It is right practices and sound choices let us weeble and wobble, but not fall down when the life boat gets rocking. From my lens, the most common denominator that will help anyone - football player, busy mom, investor, chef, tire salesman, school teacher, etc – is meditation and then self-work. It’s the ultimate training - to reduce the frequency of life’s ‘bad calls’ and increase our resilience despite them.

However (I’m sorry to have to say) it’s not the bullet answer to everything. Practices like meditation may serve to clean up some of the subconscious rubbish, but often more subtle effects are elusively at play and so therefore harder to quantify. My empirical observations have shown me that often a trail of bread crumbs to the next helpful opportunity is more easily illuminated for the person who endeavors to intentionally focus the mind and lift up their spirit. Can direct correlations be proven? No. But I’ve been doing and watching closely and I see the patterns. Organically the right teacher appears (in the form of a therapist or coach, a book, a video, workshop, friend, or yes, teacher) and with the right dedication to process, we can learn to uncoil certain limiting patterns and retrain more helpful ones. We can change our behavior, our responses, or at least create new types of responses to same types of behavior.

I call it elbow room. Practices get us elbow room. Endeavors get us elbow room. Real relaxation gets us elbowroom. Then we can change. Is it easy? No. Does it have to be arduous? Also no.

If only it were as easy as training to play a sport (ahem, acknowledgement of irony here!). But alas there is no endzone to reach in the game of life. Life is an ongoing series of ten yard attempts, luckily not limited to four, but rather with perpetual downs... but the end zone... that’s a moving target at best. (Actually the yogic texts do qualify why we seek to enlighten during our journey in the flesh; an endzone of sorts in the form of release from the karmic wheel, as do many other theological precepts in the form of something akin to heaven, but none are tangible to the liver of life, all require blind faith in the ineffable.) Playing better than all the “calls” may not be possible. We can’t catch all the balls either. But not trying to avert flags on the field is a losing strategy. This is your one life. Play it well and enjoy the playing.

*Auto biographical side story about being on time, which I’m not always, but getting better at. About twenty years ago I headed to the Tuscarora reservation to meet a spiritual and self development teacher, Tahwehdakqui, who I’ve spent many hours sitting in counsel with privately and in groups. I was running late. Not a couple minutes late, about fifteen. That day my entire session with him ended up being about why I ‘do lateness’. What self limiting psychological addictions to emotions did I have that being late fulfilled. He helped me excavate for a couple hours and like any good archeologist of the mind, I uncovered some unknown patterns that were fed by incidences of lateness.

I found out that the anxiety lateness caused me fed the addiction to anxiety in the mind and tension in the body. That anxiety was fed by a pattern of fearing disappointing the people on the other end of my late arrival. Thoughts of their disappointment fed a pattern of fearing not being liked, or valuable, and losing respect. Not being liked, valued or respected fed patterns of lacking self worth – the old ‘I’m not good enough’ story, tucked deep in the workings of my inner mental engine. That pattern is the penultimate pattern that governed many of my limiting behaviors. With Tahwehdakqui and then later with an Internal Family Systems therapist, I’ve gotten to know that emotional ‘part’ and come to understand what it's benevolent intentions for me are. First recognizing, and later reconciling my relationship with the ‘I’m not good enough’ part, has benefited nearly all aspects of my life. (By the way, most folks have a part like that, covertly playing out in some insidious way.)

How did it affect me being late? I wish I could tell you I’ve never been late since. Alas, I’m still sometimes late. However, I did start to improve. I have come to prefer the relaxed feeling of knowing I’m going to be on time. Also, my energy around lateness is often different than it once was. Often (not always) I see the choices I’m making that might cause lateness and preemptively accept the self-inflicted consequence of lateness. When I fail at seeing how I’m making myself late, and find myself surprised at myself for not budgeting time better, I generally (usually, not always) forgive myself more quickly. I accept responsibility, I make the necessary apologies and reparations, if necessary.

Believe me when I tell you, it’s a work in progress! But, at least there’s been progress. Dane abhors rushing. He will not. He will almost always build his time/life infrastructure to accommodate having enough if it. He will not speed in his car. He plays better than the calls. I, on the other hand, will almost always try to do one extra chore, even if I scrolled too long earlier. I like to drive fast. I still have a pattern addicted to the game of it – the game of getting there on time despite being squeezed for time. So, sometimes I play the game and risk the calls. Sometimes I play terribly and don’t win (am late). Sometimes I play ok, but not better than the calls (am a little late or just barely on time, stressfully.) But sometimes I use a timer, choose one less activity, discipline against scrolling, and, flags or no flags, I play better than the calls and I win (am on time and relaxed).

So, what area in life could you use to improve in so you can play better than the calls?