inner game of tennis is like impro in that it's about something much broader than its stated subject material. it's written by a tennis coach trying to explain how he coaches people to be good at tennis and it turns out the answer is non-doing!
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actually gosh i'm just going to keep quoting from the beginning of the book because it's really well-written
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he gives a bunch of verbal instructions to his tennis students and it just tenses them up as they *try really hard* to follow all of them, vs. he demonstrates to them the desired behavior and asks them to imagine and then imitate it and it works perfectly
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an athlete in the zone is "out of his mind"; "more aware of the ball... not aware of giving himself a lot of instructions"; "it just seems to happen - and often with more accuracy than he could have hoped for"
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racecar drivers too:
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I think @m_ashcroft would be pleased to know that one of the differences between newbie racecar drivers and professionals is, the professionals expand their awareness and look very far ahead, iirc looking for the next turn instead of just the turn they're currently navigating
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love it when stuff from different fields lines up like this!
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yeah it seems like there’s a general principle about attention, awareness, and how it’s distributed, managed, danced with. Iirc some anecdote about pilots feeling like they *are* the plane
Feel like a lot of our friends here have different but similar internalisations…
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and you could even say that we are a megamind, a distributed attention-awareness as a collective mindcity, figuring stuff out. Very trippy to contemplate and perceive
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for sure. one could ask "what does it mean for a group of people to collectively expand its awareness and non-do?"
hmmhmmhmm maybe it is time to actually learn alexander technique also 🧐
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it feels AMAZING to be in a room of people in expanded awareness Alexander space
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