Three Pounds of Denim
Discipline, sustainability, and progress in a pair of thrifted light-wash jeans.
In the Zen Buddhist tradition, a koan is a sort of puzzle that’s meant to show the inadequacy of reason alone for revealing insight. A popular koan: “What is the Buddha?”, with its answer, “Three pounds of flax.” A meditator is meant to consider what the Buddha (the spiritual entity, not the man) “is”, consider how he might exist in a pile of flax, find themselves failing to make much sense and sort of stumped, and then sit back into that feeling itself, that the investigation isn’t getting them much of anywhere. At this point, you’re invited to consider if other everyday inquiries are as useful as you might believe them to be.
Being far from a Zen master, I’m susceptible to stumping by puzzles that are far less profound. Right now: discipline. An essential pro-athlete quality, it’s what we celebrate with stories of players showing up to the gym before the coaching staff each morning, camping out in the film room, doing every rep in practice at game speed. We hear about Kobe Bryant showing up to breakfast with ice on his knees, so committed to his craft that he’d already been working. But, at risk of asking the most insufferable kind of question: what is discipline? And how exactly does it manifest itself in practice? And does it really align that well with the myths we’re told?
I want to be a far better professional golfer than I am now. To get there, I’ll have to surpass a lot of players who are currently better than me, and I’ll have to fend off everyone else who also wants those spots. And so, if I’m meant to come out on top and grab a spot on a major professional tour, then I’ll have to beat out a lot of other people’s best efforts, presumably via some greater dedication to the process of getting good.
As such, discipline seems to mean some unwavering fealty to long-term desires for greatness over short-term desires for comfort. The logical upshots become simple and unambiguous. If there’s reason to believe it will make me better, then do it. If it doesn’t feel good while doing it, disregard — in fact, maybe go harder. The correct amount of practice is more practice. The right time to get to the gym is earlier. If you don’t want to journal, journal anyways. Don’t allow the possibility of the other guy getting an edge by doing more. As the Nike ad says, “winning isn’t for everyone.” It’s for people who tolerate things that second-place finishers don’t.
After a few months of this routine, it becomes less clear if I’m becoming a winner or a Sherwood Anderson character. In my attempts at discipline earlier this fall, I’d get to the gym tired, hit balls feeling foggy, go back to the gym dizzy, throw half the kitchen in a shake (maybe my diet’s the problem?), and journal all the reasons I should feel confident. The question emerges: isn’t the point of discipline to feel, as a competitor and person, better? How did Kobe keep at it like he did? How much more discomfort would I have to push through until it felt good?
When Hurricane Milton hit, I told myself I’d take the day off. I slept in and read a book most of the day. Around mid-afternoon, I felt like something was about to get me. A sort of unseen-danger monster-in-the-closet feeling that’s too irrational to put my finger on but too strong to ignore. Alone in my apartment, with no threat to speak of, taking my first day off in a while, I felt like I was in some very serious danger.
Last Thursday, two college teammates joined me for the RSM Pre-Qualifier, where we all missed the cut. We then drove to one teammate’s place in South Carolina, stopping in Savannah for most of the day. We saw the SCAD museum, appreciated a bunch of art, found an incredible coffee spot, and stopped next door at a thrift shop. Both my friends wore jeans, and they suggested I needed something else to wear besides golf shorts and webbed belts. They picked out a pair of light-wash jeans for me to try on.
There’s something about the fact you could never wear light-wash jeans on a golf course that became suddenly profound. I went into the fitting room a professional golfer taking an off day after a missed cut. I walked out a recent grad in jeans and a prog-metal t-shirt exploring Savannah with college friends on a day off work. I held a well-stickered coffee mug filled with a pour-over I knew was worth paying up for. The store’s dog wandered over to me to scratch its head.
I realized: as much as the rest of my life remained an aspirational work of progress — my golf runway a mountain climb, my writing still frustratingly short of capturing My Whole Experience, my college band on indefinite hiatus, my cleats hung up on my academic career — it was impossible to be bad at who I was in those jeans. There was nothing to do. I walked out of the fitting room, looked in the mirror, and thought I looked dope. My friends said I looked dope. It felt right. And that was all.
I backed off my schedule after Milton. I started waking up at 7:30, eating breakfast and brewing coffee until 9, writing some, practicing for four hours give or take, playing when there’s a game, and usually getting home before sunset. I’ve been feeling better. And I’ve been playing better golf. This is strange to me. I’ve been putting in fewer reps, done less to keep my moves consistent, have less grasp than ever about what length wedge swing will produce what carry number. But, on the course, I’ve improved in every facet of the game. It’s a bizarre logic that I don’t much understand but can no longer deny.
Something to consider: maybe the most impressive part about Kobe Bryant’s mythology isn’t that he did all that work, but that he kept himself feeling good while doing it. Not that he got in as many reps as he did, but that each one contributed to his confidence, and that he maintained himself through his work ethic. Maybe it wasn’t that he held long-term greatness over short-term comfort — maybe it’s that his short-term comfort aligned so well with his plans for long-term greatness.
So, how does one — do I — pursue this alignment? If I’m committed to long-term greatness, what form must discipline take? I haven’t found a tangible answer, aside from a pair of thrifted light-wash jeans.
As it turns out, a monk’s robes are spun from precisely three pounds of flax. In this sense, the answer to the koan isn’t entirely meaningless. In the traditional context, in which a monastic asks the question of a Master, the Master replies that the student wears a form of the Buddha as he stands before him. That, even before he asked the question, he carried a form of the answer. That what action is right and wrong isn’t preordained, isn’t prescribed, but is determined solely by what feels most true.