The old wooden roller coaster in Coney Island that once claimed to be the biggest in the world is still there.   I don’t know how much it cost to ride it now, but when I lived down the street from the Cyclone in the mid-nineteen sixties, the price of a ride was 80 cents. That was way too steep for this pimply teenager—about a penny a pound actually, so all I could do was imagine the feelings of the intrepid riders as I heard the squeals of excitement from my 13^th story window in Brightwater Towers.

That was the excuse I gave back then.   But as I look back at it now, and feeling as I do about my own life mimicking that ride, the truth, I imagine, was that I was just too frightened.   Eighty cents indeed was hard to come by, but if I wasn’t so afraid of my frail frame evading the harness and tumbling to the pavement below I might have managed to find the requisite change left behind in the coin returns of pay phones.   Remember pay phones?

For every incline, for every ascendant pleasure, each plaque of appreciation, every dollar in the bank or glistening smile from across the room, there is an attendant crash.   I don’t think I knew it then, at least not consciously, but now I know too well that there is no grace without a fall, no breaking of a glass ceiling without mortal gashes from scattering shards.

In aviation there is an injunction that, if not saying it all, says it the most.   When you are about to crash, you have a singular task: to fly through it.   Not around it, but right through the middle of it. The simple four-word command to my mind reaches rarefied tattoo status: fly through the crash.

This is preposition power in all its elegant glory; to go through something implies there’s something beyond it.   You can go into something without ever coming out of it, such as a coma or a whole mess of trouble.   But to go through it means you’ve made it to the other side—scathed or unscathed— and therefore requires the assumption or faith that indeed there is another side.

It is, it seems to me, a fundamental principle of how one effectively deals with most of the crashes that a long enough life inevitably brings us.   I have had a few fairly overwhelming ones in my life, ones that I would certainly not wish on anyone, except perhaps in a few cases those who may have caused them.   (I’m struggling to let Karma handle those, but I hear she’s a bit of a chameleon and you can never tell if she’s really there.) You may well have managed to live through a few crashes yourself, maybe even some much worse than mine, and given that you are reading this now you have found some way to survive.   I suspect, though, that the more you continued to fly your airplane right through the crash the better the outcome.   The alternatives are denial and panic.   Denial– closing our eyes, pretending we aren’t in the midst of whatever painful landscape we are inhabiting, doesn’t bode well.  And when we begin to take in water and panic at the fear of drowning, that panic can lead to franticly flailing and taking in more water until we succumb.

The idea of accepting where we are rather than denying or panicking, and then continuing on by putting one foot in front of the other, is how we fly through the crash.   We just know where we are and continue to act toward whatever resolution awaits us on the other side.   And if we do so crippled by fear, having already taken in enough water to feel as though we are drowning, then we remain afraid, because that is where we are, as long as we continue to do what is necessary to keep flying.

While I am referring to faith, which is a deeply rooted assumption in a positive outcome, I am not referring to hope, which to me is a hook screwed into drywall that misses the stud. It may temporarily hold a flimsy picture, but don’t try to hang anything heavy on it. Hope will not get us through a plane crash, because if we depend on hope to get us through then we will end up assessing many potential disasters as hopeless, thereby robbing us of the motivation to keep flying.   It is only faith, which doesn’t ask questions or analyze situations, that keeps us fundamentally motivated to do what appears impossible, and keep flying.

Inevitably, we will survive some crashes and not others.   We just won’t know which is which until and unless we fly through them. There is an exact replica of the Cyclone at Magic Mountain in Valencia, by the way, about a 45-minute drive from my home in Ojai.   Some years back I paid the price of admission and tried it out.   By that time, I already survived a few crashes, so the Cyclone was a breeze.   I walked away from it a bit queasy, but mostly, I am here to tell you, I flew right through it.

Sometimes I still feel it as the airplane lifts off the runway, and for a brief moment my body becomes heavier and my stomach lighter as the ground begins to shrink below me.   I definitely feel it as the airplane enters a billowing cloud, and I become temporarily white-blinded and meld with that which from the ground I have often looked up at and tried to find meaningful patterns in.

There are moments of alchemy in which the ethereal crystallizes into the tangible, and the tangible appears to dissipate into ether. These moments are at once pleasurable and gratifying, and occasionally transformative.   People seek them, but I don’t think they can easily be found by seeking. They hide whimsically behind trees like children, but only come out when little is expected of them.

In each of these moments, all that exists is that single moment. We are unburdened by the past or future, by pretense or self-consciousness.   Shame, guilt, depression and anxiety vanish.   We become, fleetingly, exactly what we are and nothing else.

After all, most of us spend our waking hours engaged in acting out some sort of a role—a husband or wife, father or mother, sous chef, poker bluffer, dinner guest.   For those of us who may find life outside the confines of our solitude a struggle to put some square part of ourselves into the round holes of social interaction, moments in which all masks are off and our intrinsic selves are all we need to get by are precious.  For each of us, I think, whether socially fearful or not, freeing ourselves from the burdens of our roles allows a receptive engagement with the world around us, and when we do so we gain altitude, as it were, elevating those moments above the rest, and in the process elevating ourselves.

These numinous moments have the potential of becoming pivotal when they change the direction of our lives, but that doesn’t happen too often, and for stability’s sake probably shouldn’t.   Most of these moments are merely brief glimpses into what we hope heaven might feel like.

While seeking those moments can be a frustrating endeavor, most of us do try to create the conditions under which they are more likely to occur. Whether they are more likely to come in nature among evergreens and moss, or in a dank basement among rusty bicycles and greasy furnaces is a matter, I suppose, of knowing ourselves and our histories.   And whether they are more likely to come in a novel environment or one with which we are familiar and have traversed a thousand times, is also an open question.

When and how the numen appears I suppose is different for each of us.   It happened to me the other day when a red-haired, fair-skinned waitress with porcelain features and light blue eyes walked tentatively across the floor of the café where I was sitting to deliver some plates.   Every movement seemed fragile and uncertain, and something about her vulnerability tugged at me.

It used to happen to me (before my taste was diminished by cancer) when I ate certain sushi and closed my eyes because my visual sense detracted from the climactic experience of the perfect combination of tastes.

I still feel it sometimes when I listen to music and all else in life seems free from worry, often in the voices of Frankie Valli, Sinatra, Paul Williams, or Janis Ian.   Occasionally, Tim Moore singing “Second Avenue’ or Tom Waits singing his “Heart of Saturday Night” will set something stirring.

I can feel it when I touch a beautifully bound and printed book, or see a glimpse of a painter’s soul in her art. I used to feel it on boats moving across a body of water, perhaps in the primitive recollection of being tucked safely in the uterus, the taste of the saline mist and the gentle rocking as if held in loving arms. I feel it occasionally in the innocent, winsome, carefree play of a child.   A killer poem, such as James Reiss’s “The Green Tree,” will do it to me almost every time.   And of course, it happens sometimes when I am around the people I love; perhaps it is the very thing that defines that love.

I don’t have that feeling much anymore, and I wonder if that’s what happens when we pile up too many resolved or unresolved crises, or losses.   I don’t agree with Nietzsche’s statement that that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger; I think instead that it deadens us in another way, by numbing us to whatever numen might be hiding just behind the tree.   Occasionally too I think the lack of numen in my life is a sign of dysthymia, a jargon term for a mild depression.   But then I think that no, it is, instead, simply dukkha, the Buddhist notion of the rather normal suffering that pervades our daily lives and is part and parcel of that terminal condition that comes along with consciousness itself. And I also remind myself that efforts to combat that feeling of emptiness are only likely to worsen it, the efforts themselves setting up an ultimately unwinnable battle.

When I let myself think about it, which can be a curse unto itself, I wonder why I do anything in a life that is guaranteed to end. I don’t know why I write these blog posts, I don’t know why I fly, I don’t know why I go to the movies or travel.   I don’t know why I sing, write songs, or listen to music.   But I do know that I resent going to sleep because I feel as though I am going to miss one of those things, or something, or anything.  I do know that the more I concern myself with figuring out the reasons for things the less I seem to enjoy them.   This narrator who accompanies me wherever I go trying to figure things out can become annoying, and sometimes I want to shoot him, but I am afraid that if I shoot the narrator he’s likely to take me with him.

I am looking now across my living room at my dog who, despite her large lipomas has found a rather comfortable position in which to snooze.   She’s an old dog, and likely to die soon, but I don’t imagine she thinks much about it.   I do think she has a narrator, but I think the narrator tells her different stories, stories about the walk she took yesterday or the dog that once tried to bite her ear off.   I don’t think she worries much about dying, or whether or not she is losing her faculties, or if the strange sensation on her tongue means her cancer is returning. She simply manages to limp her way through the walk down the road, where the numen, perhaps in the scent of a rabbit, can be found hiding just beyond the tree.

For a short time, the woman who eventually became my wife lived in Schaumburg, Illinois, where she taught fifth grade. When I went to visit her from Kentucky where I was attending graduate school, she said she had two cats, but that I was likely only ever to see one.   Shadowfax, it seems, was terrified of strangers, and always hid when people were around.   I asked her where she thought Shadowfax might have been hiding at the moment, and she suggested he often hides beneath the Indian print skirt covering the large, retired wooden spool that served ubiquitously as a table in the sixties and seventies.   I got down on my knees, lifted up the skirt, saw a wide-eyed black cat cowering in the corner, reached in and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, pulled him out and cradled him firmly in my arms. My future wife was stunned by my stupidity, thinking no doubt that by all rights I should have been mortally wounded by panic-driven claws, but I was more than confident. I didn’t think about it; I just remembered what it felt like to hide behind the couch and somehow knew what was required of the situation.

I struggled with extreme shyness most of my childhood, to the point where neighbors used to say that they didn’t know my parents had three kids—they only ever saw two.   And when I learned about Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, I remembered the sound of the doorbell in Queens that signaled my darting behind the semi-circular couch in the corner of the living room.   That corner behind the couch was my temenos, my safe and sacred space, where no one could harm me.

At 14, I somehow managed to find a girlfriend (or rather, she found me), but she grew increasingly impatient because I found one excuse after another to avoid meeting any of her friends. Approaching a group of people, and parties in particular, was like walking through the gates of hell.

When I reached my early twenties, I vowed to overcome my shyness and I used every technique I could find in the textbooks and some I invented on my own to lick it.  The best strategies were the ones I developed on my own.   It’s embarrassing, in retrospect, but the most effective was simply to pretend, to convince myself I was someone else.

Although I was skinny as a rail, hunched over, and had a face that was plagued by “the second worst” case of acne my dermatologist had ever seen, convincing myself I was someone else meant that I would imagine I was handsome and famous (Paul McCartney was often the favored choice), study their mannerisms, and pretend I was them. When I was a Beatle, I even had a pretty good Liverpool accent, but I only went that far when talking to myself.   The thing about self-help is that some of these silly things work, and when they do it’s pretty exciting.

“Fake it til you make it” wasn’t quite a mantra, but the fact that people responded positively to the feigned confidence made it worth the discomfort and great effort that went into it.

But faking it had its down sides.   Besides the effort it took, I knew it was a fabrication, a mask to hide the truth, and in lying that way I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt, but perhaps even worse, I was still hiding. Yet, I also knew that the goal of faking it was to make it, and making it means that the it you’re seeking becomes a genuine part of your personality.   It’s a classic strategy for learning anything, especially in the arts.   Some of us read literature in order to write; how many poetry professors over the years would tell us to imitate the style, if not the content, of our favorite poets, until we find a voice that is distinctly our own?

But imitation can only get you so far to making it, because, well, after all, I wasn’t born in Liverpool and can’t sing worth a damn.   The goal is only to model others insomuch as we learn who we are, what feels right and good, and matches whatever inherent predilections we might have.   To truly conquer diffidence, you need more tools in your toolbox.

I tried implosion, in which you force yourself to face your worst fears directly by brass knuckling it, and systematic desensitization, where bit by bit you pair relaxation with your fears. I became so good at relaxing that after my first year as a psychologist at a day treatment center for children with emotional disturbances I was voted the person the staff “most wanted to go through a crisis with.”   I was really hoping to get “best dressed” that year, but I had to settle with the former.

Hypnosis helped as well, although those effects were serendipitous outcomes of my work with clients.   I would use the prompt of having my clients press their thumb against their index finger, and gently squeeze them together in order to trigger a relaxed state that we had previously practiced, and after a while I would begin to recognize when I was tense because I would look down at my hand and notice my own thumb and index finger pressing together.

The encouragement of angels helped as well. As an intern at a large state mental hospital, I was required to attend case conferences in which the staff sat around in a circle discussing a patient.   Once, after having attended multiple conferences and never daring to speak, I meekly raised my hand (unnecessarily) and made a soft-spoken comment in spite of my rapid heartbeat.   After the meeting, the kind charge nurse came up to me, and undoubtedly out of some maternal instinct not normally found within miles from a psychiatric hospital, told me that she really appreciated what I had to say at the meeting.   It was sweet and simple, but that small kindness went a long way, given that I remember it so well now 40 years later.

I do believe, along with Eliot, that the goal of this one wild and precious life is to return to the starting point and know that place for the first time.   If I did return to that beginning, I might find myself hiding behind the couch again, or at least finding my own temenos and settling into that feeling of comfort and safety.   In some ways, retreating into my favorite chair at home, my car, my workshop, and my office are all little corners in which my five-year-old self hides.  But I think I have traveled too far, been scratched and bitten too many times in this life, to reach into a dark place to grab a terrified cat.   But who knows?   I pretty much licked that shyness thing, so maybe anything’s possible.

#

Thomas Moore, the monk, musician, professor, psychotherapist, and author of a series of “soul” books, tells the story of a Zen master on his deathbed. His monks are all gathered around him, and the senior monk asks for any final words of wisdom.

The old master weakly says, “Tell them life is like a river.”

The senior monk relays this message to the other monks. The youngest is confused and asks, “What does he mean, life is like a river?”

The senior monk relays this question to the master, who replies, “Okay, life is not like a river.”

When I bought my Diamond DA-40, a sleek single-engine, four-seat airplane, back in 2008, I was rightly required to take a transition course to help me adjust to my new steed. Transition courses have saved many lives, and I was grateful to do it.   Although there were many new, sophisticated features in my airplane, the most difficult part of flying nearly any airplane is, of course, landing them.

I was proud of my landings in the Cessna 150s I trained in, so much so that I could dare you to throw a quarter on a runway and bet that I could land on it.   But landing an airplane with long wings close to the ground and double the horsepower that seemed to just wait around eagerly wanting to fly was a steed of a different color. My initial landings were acceptable, but the transition course focused mostly on other things, so I took additional lessons afterward.

That next instructor gave me very clear, specific advice on how to land my new airplane properly. Airplanes have certain landing attitudes, which in this context means the lateral angle of the fuselage to the ground, that seem to work best.   My instructor wanted my final approach to be as flat as possible all the way to the runway, so although I was descending at a certain rate and moving forward at another rate, my nose would be level with my tail. This was somewhat different from how I landed the Cessnas I had flown before, but eventually I was able to do it fairly well.

Then along came my instrument instructor, who saw my landings and immediately reprimanded me for doing it all wrong. The best way to land my low-wing airplane was to point the nose at the runway, and keep my tail in the air behind me.   I was confused.

Then, a few years later, on an oversold commercial flight, I was lucky enough to sit next to an airline pilot whose job it was to fly regional jets.   In fact, she was flying the jet we happened to be in at the time, and was sitting next to me in a curtained-off section of the cabin to get some rest while she was temporarily relieved in the cockpit.   Before she closed her eyes, I explained the conundrum, and she told me: there’s several ways to land an airplane.   I usually land one way for 10 times, then I rotate and land another the next 10 times so I don’t get stale.

Perhaps, life is not like a river after all.

In some psychotherapy circles, advice is seen as a mark of an inexperienced or ill-trained psychotherapist.   I don’t entirely agree, thinking instead that advice is akin to having a rudder, and inexperienced therapists, like inexperienced pilots, just don’t know how to use their rudder well.

Many clients become rightfully angry with their therapists for withholding advice.   After all, many people see therapists because they think that therapists know the recipe to the secret sauce that makes life tolerable, or that they know the route out of the maze of each client’s suffering.   And, to some extent, good therapists do know these things and more, so it is a reasonable request for clients to simply ask and then receive, especially given the fare.

But in the hands of a lesser skilled therapist, advice can become problematic because it can be based on the therapist’s worldview rather than the client’s.   And, at the same time, advice-giving in some contexts can obscure the part of the therapeutic process that instills self-reliance. I would often deal with this dilemma when clients sought parenting advice by saying: “I’ll make a deal with you.   I promise I will answer your question if you will first reach into the deepest part of you and tell me how you think it should be done.”   While this gambit often irritated my clients, after some cajoling they played along, and I would always make good on my promise.   Inevitably, after telling me their own answers to their own questions, my sincere response would start with “Wow.   I love that answer, because as I expected, it turns out it’s much better than mine. I was going to say (fill in the blank), but I like your idea much better.   Clearly, no one knows your child as well as you do.”

There is another story, one that I read many years ago and liked so much that I jotted it down. I don’t remember where I got it, but it might have been from that font of profundity, Reader’s Digest. The story goes that a reporter asked then president Harry S. Truman if he ever gave his grown daughter Margaret advice. Truman allowed that he did on occasion.

“What kind of advice do you give her?” the reporter asked.

“Well, I usually ask her what it is she wants to do. She tells me. And then I advise her to do it.”

Maybe that bespectacled Southern democrat, responsible both for authorizing the dropping of atomic bombs and the Marshall plan, integrating the military and helping to found the United Nations and without whose support there would be no Israel, was a Zen master himself. Or maybe not.

1. Sitting in my chair in the living room, out of the window I can see the branches and fulsome leaves of the oaks and crepe myrtle trees as they sweep back and forth, revealing the wind that has been carrying the flames and scattering embers to ignite the Thomas Fire and sending the material tokens and touchstones of lives to oblivion. Firefighters decided to call it the Thomas Fire, because it began close to Thomas Aquinas College, just a few miles from my home in the Upper Ojai valley.

The winds right now are not frantic, as they have been at times, but they are confused, darting from one direction to another, remarkably mirroring my wife’s mood.   Each sweeping movement of the branches injects an ounce of fear, it seems, into the normally placid mornings in Ojai.

I should not be writing right now, but instead I should be dressed and outside vigilantly scanning for spot fires, raking leaves and clearing debris that could ignite and spark the flames that could consume our homes and our tokens.   I should be a better protector than I am.   But I am slow to wake up, slow to meet danger, slow in my body and mind.

… So slow, in fact, that it has now been nearly a week since I wrote those words, a week in which I have discovered that a dozen friends and acquaintances have lost their homes, including one that borders my own property.   We have lost two structures—outbuildings, including a yurt that I recently fashioned into a framing studio for my photographs and a horse barn that has not seen a horse in at least 25 years.   Compared to many of my friends, we have escaped significant damage, but somehow feeling grateful in that context seems sinful and unkind.

Our children have become the heroes they always were—our son in particular working tirelessly to help others as he protected his own homestead, our daughter leaving the safety of Los Angeles to join us and do her part. My wife is the heroine she too has always been, caring for our children in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine. And I have been doing my best to care for them, although I feel inadequate in my somewhat compromised health right now, and slightly guilty that I am writing these words from a patio in a luxury hotel in Pasadena where we escaped for better air.   Angelinos reading this will sense the irony, because Pasadena is known for its poor air quality, but now it is a refuge from the toxic particulates that hide even in what otherwise might appear to be clear air in the fire area.

I recently read a story about Thomas Aquinas in which he drove off a prostitute sent from his family to “dissuade” him from joining the Dominican order by breaking his vow of celibacy.   He drove her off with a fire iron.   The threat of destruction by fire is indeed a potent force, another reminder that each of our existences are temporary gifts of resistance to the eternal, in which all eventually turns to ash.

There’s a small community hospital in Murray, Kentucky, where I went to school to get my master’s degree in psychology. As a second year student we were seeing clients in the counseling center, and one day when one of my clients didn’t show up for her appointment, I discovered that she had been admitted to the hospital for “exhaustion.” She had refused to eat for several days, and although pop singer Karen Carpenter had yet to succumb to anorexia and the general public was barely aware, the medical establishment—even in rural Kentucky, knew well of its danger and feared for my client’s life.

By truculently opposing all those well-intended folks who tried to get her to eat, my client had entered what pilots call the “region of reverse command,” in which airplanes do the opposite of what you tell them to do. I was about to join her there.

I decided to visit my client in the hospital.   Just outside her door, a nurse took me aside and said, “Please do what you can to get her to eat.   Her parents are on their way, and she hasn’t eaten in days.   We’re all really worried about her.”

Just a day or two before that I attended a lecture given by J. Thomas Muehleman, a young psychologist who may in fact be the only one of my professors from those days who is still alive (and still, I am told, residing in Murray). The particular lecture was on a topic called “paradoxical intention,” and in it he outlined the behavioral approach to the use of paradox as a psychotherapeutic tool.

Fortuitously, within five or 10 minutes after my arrival, lunch was delivered on its plastic tray, and was placed on the wheeled table next to her bed; the nurse slid the table over the side of the bed and my young, frail client looked down at it disgustedly.   From my vantage point, the ugly slab of meatloaf couldn’t have been a better choice of food.   She took one look at it and shoved the table to the side.

I proceeded with the cocky insouciance of the 22-year-old graduate student that I was:  “I don’t blame you,” I said.   “It looks…. just horrible.”   She looked at me quizzically, half-expecting me to follow everyone else’s suit and push her to eat.   “I can’t believe they would try to get you to eat that.   It looks… well, you know, it looks like a piece of shit.”

My client gazed at me angrily.   I went on.   “And can you imagine how they handle food in the kitchen? It’s probably made somewhere down in the basement.   Dirty, disgusting.   It could’ve fallen on the floor and they wouldn’t care, they’d just pick it right up and put it back on the plate…”

That was enough for her. She pulled the table back over the bed, grabbed her fork, forcefully stabbed the meatloaf and shoved it into her mouth.   As she wolfed it down she continued to stare at me with fiery eyes.   Although she was angry with me, I could see that while she was rejecting me she was nurturing herself, and that was what was important.  Before we could talk further we were interrupted by a nurse politely asking me to leave the room because my client’s concerned parents had arrived.

I admit that I was thrilled that my intervention could somehow, magically, accomplish what others couldn’t.   Psychotherapy and life rarely work that way, and a whiff of potency can be intoxicating to a young clinician, so thus began a lifelong interest in the landscape of paradox.

What began simply in my mind as a technical move, like moving a rook in position to threaten the queen– over time grew into a deeper understanding of how the game of chess is played.   Rather than simply a method of “joining with the resistance,” as some have described it, paradoxical thinking became a path to more deeply understanding how we all build shelters in which to hide our demons and modulate our interactions with the dangerous world around us.   The walls of that shelter sometimes consist of our strident adherence to our positions, however problematic or self-destructive they become.   Sometimes we can’t break down those walls by confronting them directly, because that only makes them more necessary and strengthens them.  But by surrounding those walls with love, compassion, and eventually understanding, those walls begin to crumble.

I like to think of paradox as a way of inviting a discomfiting guest into Rumi’s guest house.   The guest is those demons, those ugly, sturdy walls we construct to keep us invulnerable, the shameful and destructive behaviors that we repeat even though they trip us up and trap us.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

In the region of reverse command, the way out of danger is to do the very opposite of what you instinctively are wont to do.   When you are sinking, sometimes you need to reduce power and point the nose down in order to find the energy needed to climb.   My client, way back in the 1970’s, was suffering.   I don’t doubt that the food that appeared before her symbolized the nurturance that she found so utterly “distasteful,” and that those who benevolently pushed her to eat stood in firm opposition to her need to reject that nurturance.  I don’t believe for a moment, nor did I back then, that this single intervention was all that was needed to resolve those underlying conflicts. Yet, by honoring her protest and welcoming the dark thought, the shame and malice, she was able to make a foothold into the path of letting go of her protest and nurturing herself.

I slept just a few hours last night, having to see the second game of the World Series from my hotel room in Washington, DC, to its unfortunate conclusion.   The game ended past midnight here, and I had to be up and out a few hours later for a flight out of Baltimore back to L.A.   I am now seated on an Alaska Airlines 737, cruising smoothly above the cloud deck that appears like the surface of a brain laid out flat and stretching to the horizon.

Due to that lack of sleep, I have barely enough energy to keep my eyes open, let alone to think about how to revise the following paragraphs that some time ago I released energetically from my fingertips as I thought about the complex topic of energy management.   I have never been good in the mornings, and this morning—even as I chatted with the grateful Afghani Lyft driver who received a special residency visa from the US government after spending 5 years helping the US Army to rebuild his country—this morning is no exception.   My head feels as though it’s surrounded by cotton that penetrates my skull and inhabits the synapses, muffling the firing of neurons and sending only one key message to the remainder of my body: go back to bed.

So, in order to manage the few remaining cubic centimeters of energy residing in this fragile corpus, I will push the small silver button on the side of the console that separates me from the tall, gangly man who somehow managed to transfer every hair on his head to his left arm. Pushing that button will have the disturbing effect of reclining my seatback a measly few degrees and granting me the illusion that I am actually making myself more comfortable.   I am going to gently close my eyes along with the cover of my faithful laptop– which is actually on my laptop, stow the thing and close my eyes.   I am looking forward to meeting with you later, to tell you what I think about this very interesting concept of managing energy.

…

I write this to you today because, given the struggle with chronic fatigue that has plagued me since a nasty bout of mono at age 14, I have been unable to avoid a rather obsessive concern with energy.   Living in a body that feels as though it is always walking uphill, I am constantly reminded that energy must be managed, conserved and expended in the right proportions if this vehicle is going to get anywhere.

Energy, I am told, is defined as the capacity for performing work, wherein work is further defined as force multiplied by distance.   Admittedly, I rarely think of my own work that way, but when I do it makes perfect sense.   How much work did I get done today?   Well, not a lot of force but a quite a bit of distance.   Or, I worked really hard—didn’t get that far but I busted my ass.

This capacity to perform work we call energy comes in many forms, but at its most basic, it can be divided into two main categories: potential energy and kinetic energy.   (Stay with me, because it does get interesting.)   For a pilot flying an airplane, potential energy is usually understood and measured as altitude, while kinetic energy is measured as airspeed.   But airplanes need potential energy even before they get off the ground and gain altitude, and that energy comes in the form of the stuff pumped out of the ground and left over from dead dinosaurs.   Once refined it makes its way from storage tanks to the airplane’s fuel tanks, where it waits to be converted from a liquid to a gas, to be ignited and converted again into the explosions that fire the pistons, which then gets converted to torque energy, and so on.   Fuel gets converted so many times and so quickly that it would make a missionary jealous.

The human who is hopefully sitting behind the yoke and controlling the airplane’s energy also gets his or her energy from fuel, fuel that comes from plants and animals that more recently sacrifice themselves in order to find their way from the earth to the supermarket to the refrigerator to gastrointestinal tract.   That fuel also gets converted many times, ultimately transforming from potential energy to kinetic energy.

Pilots are essentially energy managers; every control input a pilot makes—every push on a rudder pedal or thrust lever, every movement of an elevator or trim tab, every bending of the shape of a wing with an aileron, is a shifting of energy designed to get the airplane to go where the pilot intends it to go.

None of us get out of school without learning the pledge of allegiance and that E=mc squared.  While many of us may have believed the former, few of us understood the latter.   (I didn’t really understand either.)  Einstein already knew that neither mass nor energy could be created or destroyed, but his formula took things further by demonstrating that they were essentially the same thing, and that one can be converted into the other in both directions (hence the “equals” sign).   As the song goes, “that’s all there is.” One could then argue, if mass—often described as matter, is the same as energy, then energy is all that matters (sorry about that).

I was once told that you could tell a good pilot by how often he or she trims the airplane.   To trim an airplane means to set up the control surfaces in such a way that it requires the least amount of pressure on the pilot’s part to control it.   In other words, you set the controls in such a fashion that the airplane essentially flies itself.   This is done by adjusting knobs or servos that control small tabs on either the elevator (that points the nose up or down) or the rudder (that points the nose left or right).   The best pilots set up a default energy management setting which harmonizes the airplane’s control surfaces with the demands of nature. In doing so, the pilot transfers his or her own energy to the trim tabs on the airplane, making them work harder so he or she works less.

We manage the potential energy of food by being careful to not eat too many carbs too quickly, or to buy food that is preservative free or chemically non-toxic. And we manage kinetic energy by exercising often and properly, resting and caring for the mechanisms our bodies use to convert it from one form to another.   We schedule our work lives mindful of energy-depleting workload, and schedule the rest of our lives in order to replenish and nurture ourselves.   Overall, we become mindful that we must also keep ourselves “in trim” in order to safely get us to our desired destinations, and maximize the cruise between ashes and ashes, dust and dust.

In baseball, as in aviation and in life, everything at its most fundamental level is about managing energy.   By the time you read this, someone will have won the World Series, having managed to out-manage the energy expended by the other team.   For many fans around the world, all that energy matters, and for many others, I suppose, none of that  energy matters at all.