OK, so I woke up twice in the middle of the night and on both occasions one of the first thoughts that came to mind was “I wonder how Pedro is.”
We’re two games into the season and already it’s crisis time in MetsLand:
He exited in the fourth inning of the Mets’ 5-4 loss in 10 innings to the Florida Marlins on Tuesday night with what was announced as a strained left hamstring.
So it’s the second day of April and we’ve had the ecstacy (Johan Santana’s win in game #1) and the agony (Pedro’s injury in game #2). Geez, it’s going to be a l-o-n-g season.
I read this interesting piece last night:
A few years ago, a former professional baseball player mentioned a book that had made a great impression on him. It was called “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching,” by a sports psychologist named H.A. Dorfman. …
Dorfman offers to liberate people from what you might call the tyranny of the scattered mind. He offers to take pitchers, who may be thinking about a thousand and one things up on the mound, and give them mental discipline.
Others are eloquent about courage and creativity, but Dorfman is fervent about discipline. In the book’s only lyrical passage, he writes: “Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”
His assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind. …
Brooks makes a bit of a leap of logic at the end, where he writes:
Not long ago, Americans saw the rise of a therapeutic culture that placed great emphasis on self-discovery, self-awareness and self-expression. But somehow the tide seems to have turned from the worship of self, and today’s message is: transcend yourself in your job — or get shelled.
I don’t think that self-discipline and self-awareness are necessarily mutually exclusive pursuits. And what really comes first in the mind-body thing: the mental discipline to get one’s behavior/body to change, or the body which by changing its activities and rhythms influences the mind? I don’t know. It’s like a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum.
Lately — like for the past few years — I have felt pretty aimless in both the self-discipline and self-awareness departments. I need to get back to practicing the former so that I have a chance to develop some of the latter. The Dorfman book sounds interesting; I’m going to have to get it.
