Affirmations in action

I've been using a book called The Life We are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, to direct my thinking over the past few months. Leonard and Murphy were early leaders in the Human Potential Movement, and wrote their book to provide people with ideas for daily spiritual, physical, and mental practices that could help us grow. One of their main suggestions is that individuals construct personal affirmations, visionary statements or mantras written in the present tense that direct the positive steps they would like to take.

I've been repeating one of my affirmations over and over on this blog, which is to bring a beginner's body, mind, enthusiasm and zest to my art, writing, community work and tennis. Now I'm here to report on the results of putting this affirmation in action on the tennis court.

I have been involved in some competitive tennis matches organized as a round-robin. Eight women are matched up with a different person in the group every two weeks, play a singles match, and report on their results. Wednesday night I showed up for my appointed match, with my positive and zestful affirmation in mind. Even so, I was nervous, I wanted to win, and I could feel my heart rate speeding up. I lost the first set, although I thought I was playing pretty well. On the break between the sets, my opponent told me that she thought she was playing better than she had ever played. This intrigued me. As I was about to begin the second set, this thought occurred to me: what if my good progress on the tennis court was actually connected to my opponent's progress? Was it a mistake to focus on winning, when instead I could focus on the win-win proposition that both of us would grow in our skill and enjoyment? I immediately could feel that this was an excellent affirmation, and that I felt pleased and excited about affirming tennis as an avenue for both our growth, rather than winning. I experienced a surge of positive energy.

I went on to win the next set and the match after a lengthy tie-breaker. The match lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes, an extraordinarily long period of time for a middle aged person to play singles tennis. We both played well. But my biggest excitement was not only the win, but the power of the new affirmation. Could this idea, that my growth and progress was enhanced by the growth and progress of others, be applied to other areas?

My insight was confirmed by another writer for whom I have great respect. Beatrice Bruteau, in her book Radical Optimism, suggests that the ideal for human life in community is "inter-independence, not the sharing of lacks but the sharing of abundance." She has been studying the evidence from science and mathematics that "cooperation is a natural feature of an interactive system and that under certain conditions it is more advantageous than exploitation. We have been used to thinking of life as a "zero-sum" game (what one wins the other loses: positive gain and negative losses sum to zero); most of life is actually not zero-sum, but a game in which either all parties gain or all parties lose."

The negative effects of our zero-sum thinking have been demonstrated in many areas. The other night we saw the film, Who Killed the Electric Car? a documentary which describes how General Motors created a well-designed, quiet, fast, exhaust-free electric car in response to California air quality regulations, and then proceeded to work hard to rescind the regulations, dampen demand for the car, and collude with other manufacturers to destroy the infrastructure for electric cars. Why did they do so? After they created the car, they concluded that such cars, which require far less maintenance than our traditional cars with internal combustion systems, would destroy economies of dealers, who depend on our expenditures for oil changes and repairs to stay afloat. General Motors eventually took back the leased cars from their customers, and destroyed every one.

Think of the progress that we could be making in so many fields, if we learned to see ourselves as living in an inter-connected system in which our progress is mutually inter-dependent! My personal hope is to see how this new affirmation, which was tested and lived on the tennis court could be applied and lived out in other areas of my life.