A little bit of Zen (99)

 

"Intuition is cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you've got to hook the fish."

Richard Buckminster Fuller

"We are all following hunches. We need to develop an intuition about which hunches are actually the good ones - hunches about hunches!"

GW

A little bit of Zen (98)

 

"Every beginning contains the seed of its own ending. Enjoy the things that are, when they are. Do not regret them, when they are not."

GW

The World Cup will be over before we know it, it will go by in a flash. We must try to give it our full attention while it lasts, try to sup every possible drop of joy out of it.

A little bit of Zen (97)

 

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

William Blake  -  'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

A little bit of Zen (96)

"It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play."

Dizzy Gillespie

"You can never know what are the 'best' decisions to make. You just have to try to avoid making too many of the most obvious mistakes."

GW

 

The ultimate REFRAME

I was asked - yet again - on one of the forums the other week what my rank is. And instead of just ignoring the enquiry, or castigating the questioner as an ignorant lout, I came up with this flippant response.... which I find contains a kernel of important truth. This is not silly bragging or empty, delusional consolation; it is a valuable reminder of where our true focus should lie.

"I am FIRST in the only league that matters."

This is always true, for all of us. Because the only competition that truly matters is the struggle with ourselves - to do the best we can, and to constantly seek to improve on what that 'best' can be.

Fretting about your 'Overall Rank', or even your status in mini-leagues, is a VANITY of VANITIES. It is not what the game of FPL should really be about.

A little bit of Zen (95)

"Roads are made for journeys, not destinations."

Kong Qiu ('Confucius')

"Money's just something you throw off the the back of a train..."

Tom Waits - 'Long Way Home'

Money, after all, is just a crystallization of effort, a convenient medium for translating effort into different material benefits. But money, like effort, like all manifestations of the material world, is ephemeral: we use it, and it is gone forever. Nothing lasts; but the true value of a thing arises precisely from the fact that it can only be experienced for a fixed amount of time. The value of an FPL season is not found in the numbers recorded against your name at the end of it, but in the memories of all the doubts and struggles and difficult decisions grappled with over the past nine months.

A little bit of Zen (94)

"Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective."

Saul Bellow

Things always seem worse than they are. And they often appear to be worse for us than they are for others. But even on the rare occasions when that's true, things are almost never as bad as they might be.

There is a comfort to be found in perspective.

Never give up!

 

Last year, I watched a documentary about the early years of the American Space Program which included the following very striking line on the unique mentality they looked for in their astronauts - most of whom were admitted into the selection trials on the basis of their experience as military and/or civilian test pilots. I found the observation rather inspiring. I wish I could remember who said it; no-one very famous, not one of the astronauts, I think, but one of the engineers who'd worked closely with them.

Any ordinary pilot will reach a point where he accepts the situation is hopeless. You know, the plane's 10 seconds from hitting the ground and he'll say, "This is it. We're going down. We're going to die."

A test pilot just thinks to himself, "I still have 10 seconds. What else can I try?"

We should, I believe, seek to apply the same attitude in our approach to playing Fantasy Premier League. However unkind the Fates have been to us this season, however far out of reach our original goals may have slipped,... there are still things we can fight for, new challenges we can seek to overcome week by week.

We might not always 'succeed', but we can always TRY.

A little bit of Zen (92)

 

“We must learn to accept the impermanence of all things, and find peace in the midst of change.”

Kosho Uchiyama

The games we choose to play

 

Over the past few years I've become a big fan of Robert Pantano's thoughtful Youtube channel on philosophy and psychology, Pursuit of Wonder.

One of the things that most disturbs me about a game like Fantasy Premier League is its fiercely addictive qualities, the fact that it is in essence a form of gambling - where we stake our self-esteem on our ability to predict the outcome of unpredictable events better than our fellow FPL managers.

So, I was particularly struck by this latest video of Robert's, in which he starts off from considering the parable of The Gambler from Pascal's Pensées (a man who finds he cannot renounce his vice, even when offered a huge amount of money to do so), and goes on to consider why such obsessive distractions are proliferating in the modern world. The only consolation he can offer at the end of his brief audio-essay is this, a suggestion that these activities may not invariably be all bad, and that we can still maintain some measure of self-awareness and control over our engagement with them:  "It is not winning, it is not losing; it is the hope and uncertainty we experience in the games we choose to play. And so, what seems to matter is this: wisely choosing what games we play, and how we play them. Each of us have a choice in whether we keep playing games or not, and each of us have a choice in what kind of games we play, and the bets we place."

For me, the 'answer' in engaging with FPL is to not care about the results. You can strive for better results (which is mentally improving and spiritually ennobling) without actually letting yourself be bothered whether you achieve them (which is something outside of your control, ever at the mercy of random factors in the external world). 

For me, it must be all about the process, not the outcome; and about measuring my 'success' or 'progress' against my own internal yardstick, not against the greater or lesser 'success' of anyone else.

These thoughts on gambling suddenly reminded me of this excellent Al Pacino speech in D.J. Caruso's 2005 sports gambling picture Two For The Money (a severely underrated film; unfortunately, Pacino's co-star, Matthew McConnaughey was still in his 'career slump', more box-office poison than box-office catnip at this point), in which he dismays a Gamblers Anonymous meeting by confronting the attendees with the uncomfortable fact that most 'problem gamblers' have a more serious underlying issue, a masochistic, self-destructive impulse: they are addicted to losing, not winning - because that intense misery and despair is an insidiously heightened state of being, a rush that's come to dominate their lives.

It does bother me, often, that the almost inevitable, relentless 'failure' involved in FPL might be the dangerous key to its irresisible appeal... It is something I continually try to address, and to skirt away from.

If you like Mr Pantano's style in this video, you should check out his recently published book, The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness.

A little bit of Zen (91)

 

"When you find someone else's intelligence offensive, in fact it's your own stupidity that's upsetting you; you're just looking for external targets to vent your frustration and self-loathing against."

GW

I wish commenters in the social-media-sphere were more aware of this. It is dispiriting how many of them will get all snarky and grumpy at people for having the effrontery to use complete sentences or 'big words'...

A little bit of Zen (90)

 

“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

David Hume

"A foolish man magnifies - or invents - the evidence according to his belief."

GW

An inspiration

 

In my meanderings around Youtube the other day, I stumbled upon this - an engaging profile of self-taught wood-carver Ray Kinman, who became one of the leading practitioners in his field and landed a prestigious job sculpting many of the signs for attractions at the Disney theme parks. Still active at 70, he is now a beloved teacher of his craft.

A little nugget of peace and beauty in a turbulent world...

And he has a few inspiring lessons we all might seek to use:

Be passionate about everything you do.

Your greatest asset is persistence.

Cultivate mastery through repetition.

Mistakes are where the great learning and growth comes.

Always try to push yourself a little bit harder.

Lose yourself in the process.

These, at any rate, are principles that I have tried to follow in my life, and which I try to promote in my online writings. They can even have some useful application in our FPL endeavours, I believe.

A little bit of Zen (89)

 

“By three methods may we learn wisdom:

First, by reflection which is the noblest;

Second, by imitation, which is the easiest;

Third, by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Kong Qiu ('Confucius')

παθήματα μαθήματα:  'Pathemata, mathemata' - "Learning, suffering - same thing."  

(Ancient Greek proverb)

Avid readers (if there be any; traffic stats seem to suggest I have a few regular lurkers, at any rate) may have noticed that my main purpose on this blog is to try to promote the first of Confucius's paths to wisdom - while also celebrating the third, but strongly discouraging the second (which is, unfortunately, by far the most common approach among the FPL hordes...).

A little bit of Zen (88)

 

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think."

Niels Bohr

A little bit of Zen (87)

"Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

T.S. Eliot

“Where is the insight to be found in endless statistics?”

GW

Which is not to say that there is nothing useful to be found in statistics. But you have to be smart about where you look.

A LONG 'vacation'

 

Good gracious, what is this??

Thanks to the odd scheduling quirk that we have an international break this week, followed by the Quarter-Finals of the FA Cup on the first weekend of April, we're now faced with nearly three weeks without any Premier League football!

Since the quarter-finals of the European competitions don't kick off until 7th/9th April (and only 5 of our 9 participating clubs are still involved there, after a disastrous 'Round of 16' in the Champions League), I imagine the 14 Premier League sides no longer in the FA Cup will be taking a nice warm weather break somewhere around the Mediterranean as soon as everyone's back from the internationals. (Spurs and Newcastle, out of Europe and the Cup, can take a proper holiday....)

I can't recall such a long interruption to the League schedule ever happening before. It's really a bit too long of a break, I fear - too disruptive of regular fitness and tactical preparation routines, likely to lead to some odd hiccups in form when the League resumes. But... time enough to worry about all of that next month!

After the relentless FPL onslaught of the last few months - often two games a week since early December, and endless injury problems as a result - it will be NICE to have a little bit of a rest from it all.

I feel like a song to celebrate this welcome 'time off'. Here's an old favourite from my childhood, Bing Crosby and the cast performing 'Busy Doing Nothing' from the charming 1949 film adaptation of 'A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court'. This upload to Youtube has combined the song with a montage of clips from classic comedy duo Laurel & Hardy.

That's better. I feel quite jolly now!

And, darn it, that chorus punchline might be the most Zen thing I've ever posted on here:

We'd like to be unhappy,

But we simply don't have the time.

Keeping oneself occupied is the secret to a contented and fulfilled life. That might be just that little bit harder for the next two-and-a-half weeks...

A little bit of Zen (86)

"Only dead fish swim with the stream."

Malcolm Muggeridge

This quotation, or sometimes a slight variation of it, seems to get attributed to all sorts of people online, including.... Ernest Hemingway (I'm not sure he was ever that funny; not often, anyway). But it seems to be most commonly and convincingly credited to Muggeridge. He was a journalist, essayist, and satirist of some repute in his middle years, but by the '70s and '80s (the time of my childhood), in his dotage, he had declined into an endlessly parodiable - and possibly, to some extent, consciously self-parodying - bombastic social commentator on late-night discussion programmes on the television, a cantankerous grouch-for-hire.

Rediscovering this old gem of a line has got me wondering if I should rename my 'Sheep Picks' series on here (lampooning the foolishness that the 'herd instinct' in FPL so often leads people into),... or at least start illustrating it occasionally with some dead fish photos.

Going with the flow

Here's a funny thing: although I have a great fondness for the late Shane MacGowan and his songwriting,.... most of my favourite Pogues songs are in fact written by other members of the band. This one, a rather beautiful love song by banjo-player Jem Finer, is from their later era in the '90s, after the band had finally been worn out by Shane's looney escapades and had to sack him.

The Pogues have a special place in my heart because they rose to prominence - indeed they were, somehow, one of the biggest bands in the world for a while back then! - during the 1980s, the period when I was transitioning from high school to university, and then from university to 'the world of work' (ha!), that age when we tend to listen to music most, and be most affected by it.

Although this song was released on their penultimate album, Waiting For Herb, in the mid-90s, I always associate it with a rather earlier moment in my life (funny how the mind works!). Back at the end of the '80s, I was doing a teacher-training course in the north of England, and was attempting a long-distance relationship for the first time, with a devastatingly beautiful young woman I'd just met who was at art college in London. (I always seem to fall for creative types: actresses, dancers, writers, musicians...) And although she never stood me up at a bus station, as in the scenario of the song, there were a number of  times when hoped-for visits were cancelled, or when we had awkward conversations from a payphone at a bus station (one of the most readily available to me at the time, since I was living in a small village some way outside of my university town, and having to take a bus home almost every evening). Because of these associations, several years later, this became for me, retroactively, 'our song'.

The song is notable musically for being an instance of the use of 'Infinite Guitar' - a feedback effect that allows a note to be sustained indefinitely at constant volume, here producing a melancholy and haunting background. The device was apparently invented by a Canadian guitarist called Michael Brook in the 1980s, but it is most associated with his countryman, Daniel Lanois, who did a lot to develop, or at least 'popularise' the innovation. Also a talented musician and songwriter, Lanois became best-known as a producer, particularly for his work on a number of U2's most successful albums. He introduced the 'infinite guitar' gizmo to The Edge, who was quite besotted with it for a while, and used it most memorably on the hit single With Or Without You - which probably creates some additional resonance with this song. (I'd never been much of a fan of U2 or The Edge, but I got to meet him and hear him perform at a private music biz party in the '90s, and found myself very impressed: he is a rather cool dude, and a much better player than I'd realised.)

I particularly like the opening lines, repeated as chorus:

Listen to me, baby: Once upon a time....

My heart, it was an ocean,

But you swam against the tide.

It's a song about acceptance, about moving on - without enmity or regret. How many of those are there?? It might be unique.

It's a good lesson, for life - and for FPL. Sometimes - often, most of the time - things don't work out the way we want them to. We have to try to understand how these setbacks happen, without apportioning blame - to ourselves or others. And we have to learn to bear these disappointments with good grace - and summon the will to keep moving forward.

And yet, of course, I can't escape the conviction on occasions that the girl was wrong, that life is often wrong; that the tide of my feelings was 'right', and that the girl - and the world - would have done better to have gone along with my flow, rather than opposing it.

Yes, EVERYTHING can become a metaphor for me.  Life is a metaphor for FPL, FPL is a metaphor for life.... Life is FPL....

Forgive these idle musings. I am making rapid progress into a bottle of Tullamore Dew this slow Tuesday evening....

A little bit of Zen (85)

“May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for.”

Irish blessing

"And may the head on your Guinness be tight and creamy..."

GW  (Though he probably won't be expressing himself that coherently over the coming few days, what with being a Plastic Paddy and all....)