“Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” (Hemingway 153)
Hemingway’s Jake Barnes was quite drunk when he mused about the Meaning of It All and arrived at the pragmatist’s response. 60 some years later, Sean Green was, so far as I know, quite sober when he discovered that hitting a baseball off a tee into a net had something to do with “what it was all about.
Doddering long-time baseball fans like me probably remember Sean Green, if only for one game in 2002, during which he hit a single, a double, and four home runs, producing a major league record of 19 total bases in one game.
Green begins The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH with an account of how it felt to have that kind of day. The rest of his book describes in usefully specific detail how he reached that point of peak performance, how he descended from that peak, and how he regained it, or something close to it. Throughout his account, he remains aware that what he is learning about hitting a baseball is also what he is learning about living a life.
Sean Green was not your average ballplayer. He’d grown up in Southern California, where he’d “dabbled in qigong meditation. In the winter months, I’d attended a small dojo in Newport Beach, where I learned to control my breathing . . and worked on finding my qi, or vital energy, which flows through the body” (Green 10).
When he reached the Major Leagues with the Toronto Blue Jays, initial frustrations and lack of success as a hitter led him to the batting cage: “In the cage, I would place a baseball on the tee, take a breath, smoke the ball to the back of the net, and then repeat the process, over and over” {Green 17). This daily practice not only rebuilt his swing, which his manager and coaches had tried to mold into accordance with their ideas of what kind of hitter he ought to be, but became his personal form of meditation: “For a major-league hitter, nothing seems more menial than working off a batting tee, but it’s actually in the menial tasks that we find the best opportunities to practice stillness. . . . Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
He also found the truth that Doug Glanville, another outfielder, put this way in his memoir The Game from Where I Stand: “As my dad used to say, ‘How you do one thing is how you do everything'” (Glanville 188). Green found this true of his tee practice: “Outside the cage, I was now able to do something similar with my mind. A stressful or agitated thought would come into my head, so I would take a breath, then calmly stroke that thought away, leaving behind only stillness” (Green 17).
He also learned, through this and further disciplined hitting practice, the true purpose of meditation: “Prior to this work, I had never considered that awareness could reside some place other than the head. How would I have known? After all, most of us go about our whole lives with our awareness trapped in the mind. We believe we are our thoughts and egos and nothing more. . . . I used to believe that the goal of meditation was to stop thoughts. . . . Rather than stopping thoughts, meditation is about shifting one’s awareness out of thought by focusing attention on something else. . . . 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” (Green 32).
During the stretch of games in which he had his 19-total-base day, Green was, to use an athletic cliché, “in the zone.” He remembers it fondly: “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” (Green 147-148).
The zone is not exclusive to athletes, though, as for athletes, it’s difficult to attain and nearly impossible to retain. The mind is a monkey, a perpetually intrusive one. Green had learned this well before his brief vacation in the zone, when he was still struggling to find it in Toronto. “[Teammate Carlos Delgado] and I often talked about the way our own minds interfered with our at-bats. We viewed the phenomenon as being akin to the way Bugs Bunny is sometimes depicted with a whispering angel on one shoulder and a whispering devil on the other. Back in the dugout after freezing on a fastball down the middle of the plate for strike three, Carlos or I would dejectedly admit to the other, ‘The little man on my shoulder told me he was going to throw a slider'” (Green 61).
What keeps Green and his book from becoming insufferable and smug is his honesty and willingness to acknowledge his shortcomings. Toward the end of his stay with the Dodgers, he injured his shoulder, causing his performance at the plate to suffer. He decided to “play through it,” a decision that not only further injured the shoulder but detracted from the success of the club. After he finally acknowledged the injury and went to the team physician, he recognized that “I had chosen to tolerate the disillusionment of management, the media, and fans, rather than simply to acknowledge my shoulder injury because I had believed that a tolerance for painful criticism illustrated the conquering of my ego’s need to be a top hitter in baseball. What I didn’t realize, however, was that by doing these things I was actually feeding a new identity that my ego had chosen for me, that of the enlightened, spiritually superior athlete. By publicly saying ‘Don’t look at me,’ I was in effect saying, ‘Look at me!’ Cultivating a feeling of spiritual superiority to my steroid-juiced, tabloid-seeking colleagues, I was, in a subtler way, as fully engaged in the ego as they were. I lost touch with presence as surely as if I had dressed in a gold suit and paid to have my face on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard” (Green 158-159).
But Green didn’t stop there. A more than usually thoughtful man, he kept questioning himself and his experience.
“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?
“. . . . Maybe injuring my shoulder wasn’t such a bad thing after all, as it exposed me to the idea that becoming too attached to anything, even good things like my tee work and spiritual seeking, creates problems. Overdoing the tee work had torn my shoulder, and my self-conscious attempts to become egoless had served only to make my ego stronger than ever! Both missteps were the result of becoming too attached. The previous year when I was most intensely present in the zone, I hadn’t felt attached to anything but had been simply present. All sense of myself was lost in the action and so there was no separation between me, the doer, and the doing. The experience was beautiful because of this unity, which is the way of our universe. When Eastern philosophies teach of the importance of nonattachment, I believe this is what they are teaching: the way of the frayed shoulder” (Green 160).
So far as I know, nobody has compiled a bibliography of baseball books, so I don’t know how many have been published. Must be in the hundreds, if not thousands. I do know that I’ve read hundreds, but never one like Green’s. I don’t know how much credit belongs to Green, how much to his co-writer Gordon McAlpine, but together they’ve produced the most lucid writing about meditation and presence I’ve ever read. I wish I had come on it long ago, but I’m grateful I’ve done so now.
Green writes, ” 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'” (Green 87). Sorry, Herman, but I think Green’s book gives the lie to that sentiment. His modest, unpretentious, clear account of his own search to find excellence as a hitter and of his growing realization that what he was learning could be applied to every aspect of his life allows the reader to discover the same wisdom Green discovers. The same wisdom Yeats discovered, and summed up in the last stanza of one of his greatest poems:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Works Cited
Glanville, Doug, The Game from Where I Stand, Times Books, 2010.
Green, Shawn & McAlpine, Gordon, The Way of Baseball, Simon&Schuster, 2011.
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, Scribner’s, 1926.
