on reducing stress

There’s a disc golf course in Montebello Park, Baltimore City, MD. I go there at 5pm, after a day’s work, to throw plastic. I find disc golf to be a cheap way to get exercise, hone my skills, challenge myself, and practice patience.

Until the past weekend, however, the path I took to bicycle there lead through gang-controlled neighborhoods and busy intersections. I’d arrive at the park agitated and stressed out from not only trying to avoid aggressive, distracted, and inconsiderate drivers but also worrying about drug-dealer hostility. Hence, my disc golf game suffered, and my peace of mind was compromised.

After consulting with a psychiatrist, I have decided to take a new route, one that skirts the rough areas and the hurtling, gasoline-powered, one-ton, steel battering rams driven by people ignoring their surroundings in favor of looking at their mobile phones. In terms of distance travelled, the new route is actually shorter than the old one, with fewer hills. Now, when I step up to tee off, my my anxiety levels low and I can disco stress-free, and contented.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

few options remain

A man encourages his friends to purge their lives of sadness and hatred, but despite his best efforts, little positive change occurs. For his troubles, he is badmouthed and tattled on, ridiculed and mocked. He realizes his mistake and tries to keep his mouth shut, but it is too late – he stops voicing his opinion but gets yelled at for raising his eyebrows in what is seen as a rude and derogatory fashion. Keeping the area around his eyes as neutral as possible, he tries to free his mind of the hatred boiling around him by breathing out the stress, anger, and malcontentedness he hears spewing from his quasi-adoptive family. Its mother yells at him only occasionally, but, in her anger, she reveals that she has been keeping track of his every transgression, repeating them to herself over and over until they erupt as violent and uncontrollable rage.

It has reached the point where his breathing insults the matriarch – she just recently accused him of belittling her by exhaling disdainfully while she was listing her mother's past failures and speaking poorly about her supposedly best friend. If he tries to ignore the woman's negativity and not listen to the sadnesses she repeats, she yells at him for not listening to her and scolds him for ignoring everything she says. He has been backed into a corner; few options remain. If he keeps spending time with them, he shall have to be very careful of the way he speaks, looks, and breathes, lest someone take affront to his actions. If he continues coming around, he shall have to choose between sitting stone-faced and mute with neutral body-language and a mind free of both attachment and aversion or grinning with abject glee at everything that is said and shouting approvingly at even the slightest move, nod, glance, smile, and blink.

He prefers neither option: he shall simply stay away and stop hanging with the family in question; he would rather spend his life in quiet and honest solitude than in loud company that simmers with anguished self-deception. If one lives life enslaved to the demands of the ego, if one cannot evaluate oneself honestly at regular intervals, if one prefers the stupor of ignorance to the clarity that humility affords, then one will have a hard time adapting to the changing realities of life, preferring holding on to letting go, closing off to throwing open, shedding tears of rage to those of joy. At some point, one must weigh the benefits of human interaction against those of solitude, and if the stress and sadness that comes from hanging out with certain people is greater than the joy and contentedness their presence affords, one stays away. The main lesson the author has learned is that no matter what he says or how hard he tries, he cannot save other people from their own egos, change the way they interpret life events, or influence them in a positive manner. He heard a saying recently, one that has stuck with him: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. It is time to find a new room.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

on phaltweariness - the automobile

  Today's city streets are pitted and rough as if mauled by large and powerful beasts, and the souls of the people who drive upon are similarly abused. Aggression and impatience descend without fail upon the poor buggers who drive upon today's maligned avenues.

  We the Smog Riders of the America Phaltscape (the asphalt landscape) look often with pity upon our neighbors of the road, they who spend long hours strapped tightly to chairs which are in turn bolted to the floors of a tiny metal boxes. After spending years in such torturous environments, they will have forgotten the satisfaction of moving their own bodies through space/time using nothing other than living muscle and some metal tubes bolted to a pair of pneumatic tires. Rather than the good sweat that stands upon the skin of the bicyclist after a healthy cross-town slog, the sweat of the car driver will be distressed and foul, an oozing sheen that tends to creep through his furrowed brow as he worries about the skyrocketing price of petroleum.

  The smog riding street-art vagabond knows as well to avoid paying for petrol as she does to remain always vigilant of the withering and debilitating affects of phaltweariness – it is her duty to preserve the chaotic super-abundance of Street Art, and to record for Posterity as much of it as she can. To fulfill this task, and to keep her feet on the pedals, she has learned the limits of her body's tolerance for dehydration, pain, and exhaustion, and she knows how to make herself well again.

  Given the phaltweariness, the stressed out drivers, and the miles spend cycling through the phaltscape, how does the vagabond capture every unique work of street art that is at risk of being torn down as soon as it goes up? She does not. But she does what she can do, photographing what pictures might cross her path with the road grit foulding her mouth and a song filling her heart.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on disc golf & Taoism

  The game of disc golf (in which players, in the fewest number of tosses, throw discus-like plastic discs from a designated point to a specially-designed metal catch basket) is in certain aspects akin to the elusive tenets of Taoism. Similar to the enduringly simple (but all-encompassing) message that Lao Tzu bound up in the Tao Teh Ching, the game of disc golf is at root an easy task, one that increases in difficulty, however, in tandem with the player's internal stress levels.

  The more pressure the player puts on herself to make, say, a difficult shot into the wind around a copse of trees, the harder that shot, and her subsequent shots, will be. She will be trying to force her body to move so that the disc goes in a very specific direction, but, from her rigid posture and from her attempted dominance over her body, her shot will fly foul. As in Taoism, so in disc golf we must always remember that any attempt to subjugate the Universe to one's own will is bound to backfire, and the most coveted things (such as making that nasty headwind bank-shot) are the hardest to get. (Therefore, the Tao teaches us not to covet anything, as coveting leads invariably to ruin.) The more the player pushes to make the shot the way she thinks the shot should be made, the less she is tapping into her body's inherent ability to not only make the shot, but to do it with finesse and without pride.

  The effective disc golfer is he who can put his ego aside. The great disc golfer she who can revert to a pure animal state by incorporating her ego into herself (thus neutralizing it), a pure animal state that allows her to throw her disc far and straight, her body moving in its own curious rhythms, her mind freed from sadness and joy, her entire being focused solely on the fraction of time at which the disc leaves her calloused fingers. In my humble opinion, this is the magical, secret point that forms the center of the teachings of Taoism: rather than telling you to worship in such way to that god at this time of year, the Tao Teh Ching focuses on reducing you to your most basic and fundamental forms, forms that compel you to act with complete impartiality, intent only on breaking time from This Moment to The Next. Taoism helps you to clear your mind of all the clutter and pollution of modern society; with the Tao, you can more readily realize your deep, latent potential: you can learn to express it. The Tao focuses on deeds, not words, on completing tasks with skill and aplomb but without taking pride in them, or letting them influence your emotional state.

  So is it, at times, with the sport of disc golf. The less thought-interference there is during the throwing phase, the more fluid your body motion. The less the ego is involved, the greater the chance that you will make that daring sidewinder shot around that group of bushes. So keep on diminishing and diminishing until there is nothing left – the Tao is like a bellows that is never made empty, even though it seems hollowed out. The more you draw from it, the harder it works; the less emphasis you put on your own personal achievement, the more you operate for the good of the world, an island of calm in a sea of chaos. One of the trickiest parts, however, is learning not to covet the Tao. To covet anything is to destroy it, so toss your discs with quiet competence, without ever yearning for success, your only desire a state of primal simplicity.

  Your body knows what to do. Now all you have to do is get your mind out of the way.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp