Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

A new sport

One of the difficult parts of playing a new sport is that I'm not good at it yet.

My lab played volleyball this summer. Every Wednesday after work, we trotted out to the grass behind the conference center, doing our best not to complain about the humidity and heat. We greeted the other two teams in the league (both of which had clearly played volleyball before--not just in gym class in high school, or, in my case, once during a summer program five years ago), we helped set up the nets, and we began bumping a ball around.

Volleyball was not where any of us excelled. Sure, by the end of the ten weeks, everyone in the lab had improved. We could do what might be called a volley. I could be in the right place at the right time to hit the ball, even if the ball then flew off in completely unintentional directions. When I served, the probability that the ball would both get over the net and stay in bounds was greater than chance (if I remembered to stand on the right, that is, because my serves always flew too far left). It was great fun.

It was also frustrating. I knew that given enough practice, I could be a half-decent volleyballer. Instead of the game being a matter of physical skills and pure luck, it could evolve into a complex, strategic battle, with us setting up plays and plotting out how to outwit the other team. But ten weeks isn't quite long enough to get us to that point. (Sometimes, I'm impatient.) We lost just about every match played against the other teams.

Losing is hard to watch

My lab had split into two teams and recruited a few extra interns, so most days, the five or six of us on my team rotated through four spots on the court. This meant that some games, I stood on the sidelines during the game point.

That was difficult.

I had no direct control over whether we won or lost. I had to stand there, watching, as hands missed the ball, as the ball smacked the dusty grass, or flew too far out of bounds. I had no power over how hard my teammates tried (whether they desired to win enough to dive after the ball; whether they were tired and sweaty and just wanted it to be over). I could be a cheerleader, but I could not actively influence the outcome of the game.

That was new.

My usual sport is fencing: highly individual, always solo. When you're on the strip, it's just you. If you mess up, if you lose, you only have yourself to blame. Even in team competitions, you're just adding up the scores you and your teammates have separately acquired. You don't realize, unless you've been part of a team, how important it is to trust your teammates. And that's what made volleyball difficult: because none of us were that good, it wasn't easy to trust my teammates to be there, backing me up, putting in their best effort to win even though the games were casual and couldn't be taken seriously given our level of experience.

The thing about trust is, most times, it has to be earned.

Trust and control

Fortunately for my lab, playing volleyball is not what we did full-time. When working on our summer project--establishing the Autonomous Vehicle Lab--I learned I could trust my labmates to have my back. We all cared about the outcome; we could trust each other to each do our part. Not being in control of every little detail (and occasionally standing on the sidelines) was okay, because I knew my labmates were trying just as hard as I was to debug their programs and get the quadcopters flying.

I guess the moral of the story is (besides the obvious "teamwork requires trust"), if you ever have the chance to play a new sport, do so. You never know what you'll learn.

Faded squares of fabric, strung together in repeating blue-white-red-green-yellow chains, crisscross the branches of bare-limbed trees. The gentle wind makes them flutter. Orange-gold light filters into the grassy meadow, touching a row of canvas tents and the temple house beyond. Tsechen Kunchab Ling: Temple of All-Encompassing Great Compassion. This is the seat of His Holiness the Sakya Trizin in the United States, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery established nine years ago.

I spent the past weekend there. The field work office at my college arranges this retreat every semester. Everyone I've talked to who has previously attended says wonderful things about it; this semester, one of my friends told me she was going: I should join her! I like learning new things, so I signed up. A good decision: I didn't return all chill and zen, as one friend told me his roommate had, but I certainly gained a few new ideas and approaches to mull over, and dipped my hand into a previously unfamiliar piece of the world.

Medicine for one's mind

The first evening, the twenty-something students--most from my college, four from another--gathered in the shrine room, sitting cross-legged on cushions as we listened to Khenpo Kalsang introduce Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. He began by telling us, "Do not take any of what I say on faith. Take it through analysis, if there is some benefit in it for you." Religion, he said, is like a drugstore full of medicine. You do not go to the drugstore and buy everything in it--you just buy what would be beneficial to you now. You believe the other medicine may have just as much value, but in other situations, not this one.

We discussed the foundations: the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma; the four noble truths; karma; defilements; the six perfections. When we talked about the giving, and how one should try to give what one could to other sentient beings (in the form of material items, kind words, protection, and so on), Khenpo Kalsang shared a story of the Buddha, and how the Buddha had given his flesh so that a family of hungry tigers could eat. "So," a fellow student asked, "Giving one's life for another being is the ultimate gift?"

Khenpo Kalsang, he smiled, and shook his head. "Only if you feel no regret," he said. "If you feel regret, it destroys the merit." Until then, preserve your own life, and do not give away anything that would cause you regret. This struck a chord. Self-preservation above all else, unless the right situation arises.

Knowing and understanding

Later, I talked to the resident nun, Ani Kunga, about psychology and cognitive science. She had studied psychology for a while in grad school, but now holds the view that psychologists are going about understanding the mind and understanding the knower and what knowing is the wrong way. "Psychologists," she said, "study the brain and the self externally. Ever since the 1920s, their science has been about observation of behavior, questionnaires, recordings of electrical brain activity. But the mind can only be known by you, the person whose mind it is." She said philosophy and epistemology were doing it right: looking at experiences from the inside.

A big overlap exists between Tibetan Buddhism, psychology and cognitive science. All three examine the distinction between the self and others, between the observer and the observed, between knowing and the knower. I agree with Ani Kunga to some extent--only so much can be known about the mind from external observation. But this doesn't mean that there isn't merit to such studies, nor that nothing of use can be learned in that way.

Tibetan Buddhist philosophy also approaches the mind and the self from the inside. During a second philosophy session, Khenpo Kalsang translated a sutra about a king who received advice from the Buddha. This sutra delved into some questions about the nature of the self, whether the self is a delusion, and how the clinging of self is a defilement. I intend to discuss it in more depth later, so stay tuned.

Compassion training and prayer flags

In the afternoon, a group of us gathered outside for a meditation session with Ani Kunga. Sunshine melted lazily through the tree branches above, a breeze animating the branches' shadows so they danced between our cushions. Compassion and anger were the session's topics. The key message:

"If there's something you can do, why are you unhappy? Just do it. If there's nothing you can do, why are you unhappy?"

Ani Kunga explained several off-session and one on-session technique for dealing with negative emotions (anger, hate, irritation, stress, jealousy, and so on). All the methods built off the idea that you are in control: anger is an emotion, and you can change your emotions. Stay tuned for a more in-depth post on the topic.

Another of the day's activities was making prayer flags. As Ani Kunga explained, "Prayers, wishes, hopes, aspirations--someone, many people, may share those with you. Hanging the prayer flag shares your prayer with everyone else in the world. This may do no good at all, but it may--if everyone hopes and wishes and dreams and aspires, perhaps it will do good. It may not. But if no one shares their prayers, it will certainly do no good. So on the off-chance that it will help, why not?"

Never done

This weekend reminded me that I'm not done learning. If I stay still long enough, if I've achieved a relatively constant level of happiness and satisfaction, I forget that I can and should continue to seek out new ideas and approaches, and incorporate beneficial ones into my life. A person is never "done," and so, I'll continue to observe and discuss and study, trying to pick the directions in which I'll change, and trying to make tomorrow better than today.

Ever onward and ever upward.