As a young man, I was distraught by my inability to play sports. I was ok, but never very good. I have a horrible memory about playing in a basketball game, and they inbounded the ball to me after the other team scored. I got so nervous and excited that I just shot the ball. It was my only basket for the season - for the other team. I remember the awful shame - the silence of the entire gym, my inability to face anyone, the desire to evaporate. That was extreme, but I never excelled or felt very comfortable on a sports field. Looking back, I realize that this was very simply because I was not born with an athletic body. My posture was bad, I was gangly, lacking developed musculature. And this prevented me from feeling comfortable and in control on a sports field. I used to not understand.
So now I realize (and have accepted) that to walk the path of a dancer, I need some clay to mold. I need muscles and better posture. I need to work if I want to become something - this body must be shaped.
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On another note, here are some quotes from current reading:
"It must, however, be borne in mind that the pculiar spirit of [archery], far from having to be infused back into the use of bow and arrow in recent times, was always essentially bound up with them, and has emerged all the more forthrightly and convincingly now that it no longer has to prove itself in bloody contests. It is not true to say that the traditional technique of archery, since it is no longer of importance in fighting, has turned into a pleasant pastime and thereby been rendered innocuous. The "Great Doctrine" of archery tells us something very different. According to it, archery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute, but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed - for instance with a bodily opponent. In this contest of the archer with himself is revealed the secret essence of this art, and instruction in it does not suppress anything essential by waiving the utilitarian ends to which the practice of knightly contests was put."
- Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
"On the last day of January of 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers."
"When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of a leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.
And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.
Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives. And we refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation."
-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
It seems that the true intention of our denial of love is to assert our own independence (and false sense of strength). This would seemingly allow us the abililty to exist in the world without the potential to be hurt by betrayal or loss of love, but it's not true. Because, as Merton says, this goes against our very nature of being. We are not ourselves in the sense we think ourselves to be. We are awash in a great societal, generational, planetary, psychological, aeon-long turmoil. This turmoil is the truth of our lives, not some puny (and imagined) sense of individuality. To understand this is to be as we are meant to be.
