How We Turn This Around: Zen Juju

The past few weeks have been interesting.

We were playing over our heads and setting the world on fire.  We were racking up All Star ballot votes like nobody's business.  Then, a vile and contemptible and seemingly avoidable storm blew in from the west coast.  It pierced our spinnaker, snapped our mast, and is ripping apart our bow, board by board.  At this point, the best we can hope for is to drift back to port and begin repairing our broken pieces.

While we drift, we're also bracing for the very real possibility that our season is going to sink like a rock.

During this sorry period, we, the crew of the S.S. Yankee, have tried any number of different approaches to turning things around.  We have:

• Insisted we have no chance of winning.
• Displayed pictures of comely women partying.
• Displayed pictures of not-so-comely women partying.
• Taken a fruity drink with each loss.
• Tried clamming up and saying nothing.
• Staged an International Juju Intervention.
• Derided the hubristic Red Sox.
• Investigated using farm animals to predict Yankee failures.

Nothing has worked.  The hubristic Red Sox are a half game ahead of us.

The S.S. Yankee is broken.  We're drifting and we deckhands are sitting on our barrels and nets furiously working on scrimshaw hoping that one of us comes up with an answer.  We're hoping with our carving and our art to devise some new talisman that will help us.  A talisman of such potent force that it will allow us to avoid that overloaded cargo ship ― yes, that one right there off our starboard ― which we didn't see coming and which now seems to be heading straight for us.

Since nothing seems to be working, it occurred to me that maybe we should just try ... (drum roll) ... nothing.  Tonight, let's just watch the game.  We don't need to think about 2016, or 2018, or comely women, or fruity drinks, or Hal, or sheep, or our dismaying propensity for stranding runners.  Let's turn our minds down to a Chance the Gardener level of mush and "just watch".

In other words, maybe we're trying too many things instead of just watching.  We need to be like those Zen masters who achieve a state of mind where the spirit does not seek to obtain anything. We need to arrive at an attitude in which we're not burdened by mundane earthly concerns such as seven fucking losses in a row.  We need to eschew any attempt at seeking personal profit.  (For the purposes of this discussion, we can define "personal profit" as "one fucking victory, please".)

To achieve true insight, we need to rid ourselves of our earthly concerns.  Without a clear state of mind, we Yankee fans cannot hope to achieve universal wisdom.  We need to transcend the dualities and limitations created by our egos and our faltering rotation. We need to understand that even when we lose we are always free, always happy because we can just watch a baseball game.

We need to move toward a Zen form of Juju in which we act without wanting to achieve a result.  Tonight, perhaps, we need to sit cross-legged on the floor, fold our hands, clear our minds, and just watch.

It couldn't hurt.