Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

field. He hit it a mile. It slammed high off the back wall of the
enclosed stadium and bounced back onto the field.
As Green’s teammates went nuts in the dugout, he kept his head
down and rounded the bases with the same calm, deliberate trot as in
his previous three home runs. You couldn’t tell from the lack of
celebrating, but he was in that moment only the fourteenth player in
history ever to hit four home runs in a single game. Six for six, with
nineteen total bases and seven runs batted in, perhaps the single
greatest one-game performance in baseball. The entire crowd of
26,728 people—at an away game—rose for a standing ovation. But
Green was already clearing that all away, and coming back to his
routine. He took off his batting gloves and swept the experience from
his mind, keeping it empty to use in the next game.*
Shawn Green is hardly the first Buddhist baseball player.
Sadaharu Oh, the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball,
was one too. The goal of Zen, his master taught him, was to “achieve
a void... noiseless, colorless, heatless void”—to get to that state of
emptiness, whether it was on the mound or in the batter’s box or at
practice.
Before that, Zhuang Zhou, the Chinese philosopher, said, “Tao is
in the emptiness. Emptiness is the fast of the mind.” Marcus Aurelius
once wrote about “cutting free of impressions that cling to the mind,
free of the future and the past,” to become the “sphere rejoicing in its
perfect stillness.” But if you saw those words in the first paragraph of
the write-up for the Dodgers-Brewers game in the Los Angeles Times
the next day, they would have made perfect sense. Epictetus,
Marcus’s philosophical predecessor, was in fact speaking about
sports when he said, “If we’re anxious or nervous when we make the
catch or throw, what will become of the game, and how can one
maintain one’s composure; how can one see what is coming next?”
As is true in athletics, so too in life.
Yes, thinking is essential. Expert knowledge is undoubtedly key to
the success of any leader or athlete or artist. The problem is that,
unthinkingly, we think too much. The “wild and whirling words” of
our subconscious get going and suddenly there’s no room for our
training (or anything else). We’re overloaded, overwhelmed, and
distracted... by our own mind!