Power of the Mind

I always lose games of chicken with bumble bees. I watch the incoming missile hook a quick left, swirling like it’s namesake, eye-level with my face. Ho-jeez! I flinch, ducking out of the way as the bugger jukes at the last minute, circling wide and making its round back to the flowerpot on the deck. 

Warm and cooler pockets of air trade invisible nitrogen and oxygen molecules between the voids, searching for equilibrium, causing the tree’s leaves to shimmer, shiver, wave a thousand little hands hello. Look at me! says the tree. Look at me! 

The birds on the higher branches chirp a similar request, begging for attention from any mate willing to settle. Tweet-tootootoot-tweet, the bird says, which translates to look at me, look at me! I know, because I can speak bird. Fun Jack Fact. 

Butterflies fluttering, birds chirping, leaves rustling, flowers blooming. I take a moment to check in with the surroundings and start to see this place as a paradise. It continues to astound me that the external world can be so at peace, but matters so little when the mind wanders, in a constant grapple with the discrepancy between how I imagine my life to be and the truth of this new reality. 

It reminds me of a time during the men’s league in Redmond, one of the few times our team was on the attack, the ball cleared to the touch line by our opponent’s defense. I watched from half-field as our team set up for a corner kick, and became memorized by a daydream playing in the forefront of my imagination. The field in front of me disappeared, replaced by a scene in which I was the hero, patiently waiting for the defense to mistakenly clear the ball to the midfield after the cross bounces like a pin-ball around the scramble in front of the goal. There are yards between me and the ball that gets cleared, space enough to position and time my strike. I could feel the pleasure of the kick, visualizing the ball rocketing from my right foot toward the far side of the goal, keeper helplessly out of reach and out of time. 

And then the corner was taken. The scramble in front of the goal was botched and the keeper easily snatched the ball before it crossed the line. 

At the time, I recalled what I had read earlier that morning about the power of the mind, how unique the human ability is to invent fantasies and project into the future, differentiating us from all other mammals on the planet in our capacity to invent culture and religion and hierarchies and bureaucracies. I marveled at the idea that a pleasant story in our imagination fires the same dopamine receptors as a real encounter, that we can just pretend things are nice and great and the body feels it as so. 

But then I was reminded of the importance of living in the real world as our team rapidly transitioned back into defense, our back line sprinting with the opposing strikers, quickly scheming up complex strategies to cut off an organized attack, subtle hints in agile body language changing second to second.