The Mastery of the Thing!

Reviewing two collections of poems on subjects with no seeming connection, counseling and sports, I noticed that I had used “transcendence” in either the title or the sub-title of each.  Remembering my frustration in American lit class trying to grasp the exact meaning of Transcendentalism, perhaps I should have known better than to use a closely related word likely to be just as obscure to the average reader.  But as I judged transcendence to be just the right word to convey what I sensed was the deepest allure in the worlds of counseling and sports, I chose to retain it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson once claimed that every word was once a poem, so you could say I was determined to reveal to my readers the poem not only within transcendence but, even more important, within the worlds of counseling and sports as well.  So the two books contained in the pages that follow can perhaps best be appreciated as not unrelated arenas particularly rich with the allure of transcendence.

Literally “to climb across” from the Latin, Webster’s dictionary defines transcendence as: rising above or triumphing over negative or restrictive circumstances, going beyond the limits of ordinary experience, overcoming.

In sports it is easy to see.  Think of every sport as staged adversity.  First there are the rules, boundaries, penalties—all clearly restrictive circumstances.  A service ace in tennis, for example, becomes a fault a millimeter outside the lines.  A swish from mid-court is meaningless a millisecond after the buzzer.  Then there is the external opposition—if not an opponent bent on defeating you, then a time to beat, your own best to better.  But the fiercest opposition is internal.  Our lazy self—ever on the lookout for shortcut, path of least resistance, easy way out—will prevail unless overcome by our resolute self determined to set the bar high, access every resource, prepare with diligence, then persevere no matter obstacle or odds against. 

To play sports implies far more than we normally mean by play.  We experience the deepest joy when, whatever the contest at hand, however daunting the adversity at hand, we bring all that our body, mind and spirit can muster to climb across.  And when excellence is achieved by this “triumph over negative or restricting circumstances,” by this “going beyond the limits of ordinary experience,” our spirit can only exclaim with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, contemplating the hurl and glide of a bird rebuffing a big wind, “The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”  It is the suggestion of this book that, beyond cheering on our favorite player or team, it is this potential for transcendence in sports that we secretly hope for, wait for, watch for.  Even if it’s but one score, one play, one single move in the entire game, our watchful spirit sees it and soars!

The thrill of a spectacular play

is not only the rapture of witnessing it

but the savoring singing of it after.

The sweeping sweetness of that uncanny Jordan move,

did you too see it?

The contest is less apparent in counseling, because less tangible, but it is no less real, and, for the individual stuck at a crossroads, there is far more at stake.  Seeking out help is itself an achievement of spirit given our extroverted culture’s reluctance to see admission of vulnerability as anything but weakness.

Lines from another Hopkins poem hint at the unsuspected high drama in the counselor’s office: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.  Hold them cheap/May who ne’er hung there.”  The mountain metaphor conjures up winding steep terrain, sudden changes of weather, cliffs clung to, peaks scaled, potentially dire consequences of least misstep.

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