Notes From My Journal: Chapter Eleven

Notes From My Journal: Chapter Eleven

     I guess I have learned more about playing games from Alex than from anyone else, except maybe my son, Stoke. Teaching Stoke is really where I have learned the most. Games have always been very difficult for me. I’m not talking about psychological games; through I have always had an aversion to those games too. Growing up in Philadelphia, the only games that I really got into were boxing and pinball. And, I never really went into those games with any real depth. I don’t remember receiving one minute of instruction in physical education during my whole six years of public school in Philadelphia. By the time I entered junior high school, I was so self-conscious about my lack of athletic ability that I was unable to enjoy any kind of physical activity. In junior high if you were not good enough to go out for the school teams, the physical education instructors ignored you. I can still remember the sting of having girls picked ahead of me when the captains picked teams. In our small town high school if you didn’t play at least second string on one of the school teams you were a non entity. I can’t remember any period in my life when I was more miserable than my high school years.

    In order to learn to play athletic games, I had to start right from the beginning. Luckily I had a son, Stoke. We started playing together when he was only three years old, and I was in grad school.  With a tiny toy football, I taught him how to catch. We played outside for hours at a time. As he was growing our games progressed, and I learned almost as much as he learned. When Stoke was five or six years old, I remember throwing him a pass with a regulation size football and for the first time seeing the spiral. We both were fascinated by its spin. During this period, when throwing a baseball, I discovered that I would close my eyes just before the ball hit my glove, or just before I swung a bat. That discovery alone was well worth the broken window in the old lady’s house next door to us.

    In teaching Stoke, I learned the fundamentals of football, baseball, and basketball that I had never learned as a child. Most of all, I learned that playing is fun, that it doesn’t matter if you are not super good at it. Alex joined in the play with Stoke and I.  And, soon we began some one on one against each other. In spite of his keen competitive nature, Alex nursed me along. And, I find that now in my thirty seventh year, I am finally getting competitive with him.

     When we get back to Alex’s house in Salinas, there is still an hour or so of day light left. We decide to go down and shot a few baskets. Mark and Alex sink their shots from the foul line while I miss mine. I watch them go one on one until Alex scores twenty-two points to Mark’s sixteen. I’m glad that their game ended quickly as I am anxious to play.

     Alex is not up to his regular game, and I wonder if he is still a bit under the weather. Still, I have to play my very best to keep even. As the game progresses, I warm up and begin hitting a few good shots. The game is really close, and I realize that with just a little extra effort I could probably beat Alex. I score twenty-two points first, and Alex ties. We have a rule that you have to win by at least four points. The game continues for about twenty minutes with neither of us able to get the four-point edge. I wear out before Alex does as he sinks his fifty-eighth point. I feel like I have finally put up a good game against Alex and don’t feel at all bad about losing.

     I’m completely exhausted as we walk back to Alex’s house. I recover quickly however unlike a year or so ago when I would take almost a day to recover. By the time we’re back to the house, I’m feeling really great, and looking forward to a hearty meal.

     As I type these words from my journal some thirty-seven years after they were first written, it strikes me that though I was never competitive in athletic activity, I was very competitive in other areas. I always wanted to be number one. And, maybe that is why I began to avoid athletic play as a boy. If I couldn’t be number one, I didn’t want any part of the game. Isn’t being number one a prime motivation of our time. Everything in our society is directed at being number one, all our mass media, advertisements, sport’s events, and even education. You have to be number one in your field.

     Back in the seventies when I first recorded these words, I was just beginning to be competitive in one on one basketball, competing against Alex, my high school son Stoke, and my sixth graders. And, I wonder how much my desire to be first stimulated my getting into my body, getting myself in shape.

    There were some other influences, like my new awareness of my body. In getting myself in shape, I also began to get in touch with the pleasure that comes from being conscious in your moving center, and in the emotional part of the moving center. The knowledge that total integration   includes the body and all of the body system helped me to realize that I had been ignoring an important part of my total self. Through I had not yet read Castaneda or touched upon the Work, I was begging to focus more on my body. Bucke’s statement that all men who have achieve cosmic consciousness have been it top physical condition, motivated me to look closer and my physical make-up.

     As I came to examine my physical self, I also became more aware of my competitive nature on a social level. I first caught a glimpse of it while I was still in grad school. Cal-State, Hayward was just beginning its Master’s in History program. Our entire class was made up of five full time students, and several others who were picking up graduate units. In the small classes we mostly huddled around a large wooden table our stately professors in the middle. As argued the over the interpretation of the historical treatises that were assigned to read, I was always looking for some subtle praise and agreement from the professor. I wanted to be the best student, the favorite, the one most loved.

    This revelation came to me in a flash at a moment of meditation. I saw myself in front of Dr. Ruther looking at him as a father figure. I wanted to be the favorite little boy just like I was with my own father. I wanted to be the number one student in the class. It was the same in all of my graduate classes. I gave the professors just what they wanted hear, not one thought of my own just prattling back exactly what they taught with no thought of my own. It strikes me, now, that this desire to be first is just another aspect of the self-love that stifles our being.