Broken Play

Abraham Lincoln (allegedly, though it's debated): "You can't predict baseball."

I recently changed my website name to The Benefits of Brokenness, in an attempt to better capture what I’m trying to do in all my work. Although this blog will continue to take baseball terms and look at the deeper meaning, it’s now under that umbrella. When I talk about the benefits of brokenness most people initially translate brokenness to sadness, and that sounds like a pretty depressing mantra for life. But I’m talking about something fundamentally different than sadness. I’m talking about the structure of the human condition.

First off, we seem to reside in a body, but we are clearly not totally our body, for we could lose a limb of our body and still be ourselves. I — whoever I is — am the one who is losing the limb. We are also not our mind. For even if we started to lose our memory, who exactly is losing their memory? Beyond that, we know that there is an unconscious mind; a part of us that we are completely unaware of, and that works as a kind of saboteur of our conscious experience — or so we think. Most of us also feel some connection to something transcendental, something to which we belong but do not possess, yet we can never quite put our finger on it. We also find we can be present — and be completely unaware of it — even when we are not physically in a place or time, as we have all, one time or another, spoken to the dead as though they are there and hearing us, or thought of a friend who was not physically present when performing some action. When it comes to trying to explain things about ourselves we also find that words come up short. Poetry will never stop, people will never stop trying to articulate who they are, but they will always fail. This is because we are, in a sense, always how words fail to describe us. Our true self is somehow in the gap between all these things, and a gap requires a broken structure. If we think even deeper about who we are, the gap expands. We begin to see our interrelatedness with all things. We start to realize how we depend on the entire world to be the background of our existence. Therefore, we somehow extend far beyond the boundaries of our skin into distant universes. Yet although we depend on the world, there is still a possibility for our freedom from the determinants that the world places upon us. We can come to our own conclusions, which seem independent or even at odds with our most trusted influences. How is this possible? We have our brokenness to thank. There is, more fundamental than any fundamental thing, a split which creates the subject, making us beings that are self-aware, rational, loving, and supernatural. It allows us the possibility to be at odds with the crowd, the possibility to be more than a machine that is simply doing as the greater machine wills, the possibility to be unpredictable. But the most tragic aspect of life is that we, for the most part, forsake this brokenness. Our instinct is to cover it up. It is built into our culture, it invades our myths, and this instinct controls our life without us even seeing it. My work with the Benefits of Brokenness is meant to honor and embrace this brokenness so we can begin to touch upon who we are, if even for a moment. 

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love my other work! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com