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During the first half of this year I'm helping to coach the Australian Under 24 Frisbee team, the Stingrays. This is who they are in their words, each line written by a player, it is incredible to be part of their journey. 
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There is a story that we quietly tell each other about life. A child is born and wonder is it’s world. The child grows in a family, the family is fun and tough and teaches the child what it doesn’t know it needs, later it will be grateful. The child gets their first hair cut.* The child becomes a teenager and then later changes back into a person. The person has a great/terrible time trying to work out who they are, what kind of hair they want and what to do about their life. Then they work it out, at some point. There is a meeting, now there are two people, they decide to head on through life together, this is a great part of the story we tell about ourselves. There might be a house, or a van, or lots of adventures, in all cases the people decide together what they are going to do, there is pride. Now some kids come into the story, or not, maybe a chicken-run instead, maybe just a new haircut. Work, work, work. It’s part of the story. Later there is less work and more fishing. Then children grow up, people slow down, and the whole story winds itself into a golden haze of satisfaction. The story ends, the child grew old, they had a full life, got their haircut, laughed and also suffered, they die. This is a version of the story we tell, the story we expect for ourselves. It feels like a story that maybe happens sometimes. Maybe. The issue is when life diverges from the story that we tell. This divergence can be hard, or maybe great, but often hard. If you’re walking around feeling that on some deep level you’ll live the story then you don’t, the injustice can be confronting. I don’t know what the solution is. Perhaps gratitude for the events that do happen, rather than disappointment around the events that don’t happen is a strong way to go about it. Maybe I’m just happy with my haircut.
*Hasn't happened for my 5 year old yet.
I was on the harbour with some beginner sailors last week. The conditions were very benign. Low wind, high sun - it was gentle and relaxing to be there. The task was to sail back and forth between two marks that were 50m apart. The boats did this in lackadaisical fashion, bobbing and bumping together with moments of breeze and clear direction. Shoes came off, hair was dipped in the water and the little fleet dripped with confidence and complacency. Then some wind came. It wasn’t a lot of wind, however compared with what had been happening it was quite a shift. To manage this sailors had to sit up, steer, haul and actively control their boat to travel with direction and purpose. This proved to be very hard for the sailors. Reflecting on the experience it feels like the main issue was the pre-challenge state of mind. If we had of pushed out into the wind that came at the end, I suspect everyone would have been focussed and ready to take it on and be successful. After an hour of drifting though it was very difficult to get back from the torpor the group had descended into. It was a statement on mindset and preparation, potentially true beyond a boat on a harbour.   With your mind’s eye you can hold images in your mind, these can be fanciful or actual images. With your mind’s eye you can create shapes, manipulate them and build insightful pictures only you can see. But what if one day you wake up with some sleep in your mind’s eye?
I’ve been told, by a 5 year old, that my mind’s eye is a rectangular shape and that it’s brown. Except when there is sleep in it, then it’s grey, until you wipe it away that is, then it’s back to brown and able to visualise the cosmos or a pterodactyl eating soup. Now I know a brown rectangular mind’s eye sounds pretty cool, but not when you hear that your wife has simultaneous round, square, and rectangular mind eyes and they are all silver. Suddenly old flat brown seems pretty pedestrian. This child for reference has 3 mind’s eyes, one each of a rectangle, a circle and a triangle, silver, silver, silver. Just think of the mental vistas you could enjoy with those sparkly beauties. Just as long as you don’t get that pesky grey sleep in the bottom corner of your triangle eye. It’s a good thing all you need to clear your mind’s eye is a small gentle hand across the forehead and deep compassionate love. |
AuthorHigh school teacher 
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