"HOME- PART TWO: THE FIRST STEP"

“HOME-PART TWO: THE FIRST STEP”

I may not be able to sleep through the night without going to the bathroom, but I can still spin a basketball on all four fingers and the thumb of my right hand, dribble between my legs, and dot an “i” with a behind-the–back pass.

At seventeen, I was a gym rat who lived each day for the challenge of a street game of one–on-one: first player to eleven or fifteen by ones-“make it, take it”-wins and keeps the court. It wasn’t enough simply to win. It was more than even “dogging” someone, a phrase now long out of fashion but denoting the deliberate infliction of great personal humiliation on another.

Rather it was that glorious first step past the defender who had calculated incorrectly and bitten on my first feint, stumbling awkwardly into a dark and uncertain future, unable to even watch as I galloped past him to a glorious and heroic new world.

The layup at the end was pro forma, an anticlimax.

The work had already been done so the path was clear.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to find a way to replicate that unbridled joy.

Trust me, they ain’t made that drug yet.

One–on-one basketball is the ultimate assertion of one’s will over another, much more so than the impersonal bombs lobbed at one another by tennis players. I have never once seen Roger Federer stick an elbow in Rafa Nadal’s ribs while he was going up to serve and then call him a bitch for complaining about it.

But more importantly, your own success is your own downfall in these wars. A good move can only be made once before it is anticipated, even ridiculed.

“Don’t bring that lame shit in here again, white boy.”

Or words to that effect.

So the chess game would begin, a pull-up here, a head fake there, and then a stutter-step dribble and crossover to the hoop.

This is always his first move. When he starts left, he always pulls up for the jumper. And don’t ever bite on his first pump fake. The boy has no left hand. He’s not going to do that again, he just did it. Or will he? Is he crossing me up?

I’ve been in games with guys who couldn’t spell “gymnasium” but were absolute chess masters, street geniuses who were three and four mental moves ahead of you at all times. Their impassive faces as they darted past my flailing arms told me I was unworthy of even a sneer.

That lack of scorn seared my irredeemable soul.

My unimaginative, predictable, provincial and unworthy soul.

You couldn’t be intimidated by anger or even violence. It wasn’t a foul unless it substantially altered a shot. And by substantially altering a shot I mean did you lose a finger? In fact, you simply never called a foul because it was a gauntlet finally laid down, a line in the sand to say you’ve been fouling me all day because you’re not good enough to guard me without fouling.

Street cred.

So I learned how to anticipate contact, take the blow and maintain my focus despite physical pain. In retrospect, it was the perfect training ground for married life.

Those lessons also served me well later as a trial lawyer, particularly evident in those moments when everything seemed to be in slow motion. I could see everything from what opposing counsel’s next question was going to be to what jurors were actually listening to what the judge was reading behind the bench to whether the court reporter’s fingers were getting tired.

You see, these were my homes before now, the places where I had to constantly prove myself worthy over and over again. If I won on the street, I played again, no matter how tired I was. If I won a trial, everybody wanted me to try the next one.

Until I lost. Then I sat on the sidelines as others played and wondered whether I had ever been worthy at all.

It took me months, if not years, to realize and accept that yoga was not a competitive enterprise, that getting all “medieval on its ass” was not going to bring me closer to the full expression of any yoga pose.

Mindlessly contorting my body into a pose without first doing the fundamental work was folly, a fool’s errand, and a guarantee of failure.

In those first classes, I thought only of the final product, forgetting entirely that was the work done that made the path clear. I fought the poses rather than surrendering to them, flinging myself into postures rather entering into them deliberately and mindfully. My breath was labored and through my mouth, not fueling my movements but reacting to them.

But in each class there would also be a mini-epiphany, a moment of clarity in which I adjusted deeper into a pose to a place without pain but not without challenge.

It might be knowing when to breathe as I flowed from one part of the pose to the next or to accept my short arms and long torso and adjust accordingly.

It might be actually listening without anticipation, a particularly galling occupational hazard which has caused more than one rift in my household.

Or it might simply involve starting at square one, taking a breath and getting a firm foundation beneath me, rooting into the earth and pulling up energy from it, with strong, engaged feet and legs, a solid core and my head properly aligned over my spine. 

(Okay, I know that’s some serious hippie shit -but it works.)

But most importantly-for the first time in my life-I actually accept my failures as a gift. Each such failure eliminates an obstacle, bringing clarity of mind and purpose, stripping away the negative reactions and leaving them in my wake like that poor defender descending into uncertainty and self-doubt as I went in for the layup.

I simply change my breathing, my posture, the alignment of my feet or my gaze.

I now have a checklist in my head for progress rather than wallow in a vast universe of self-doubt.

This is a great first step.

© (2013)

            NEXT TIME: “The ‘A’ Party List”