“You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.” -Ryan Holiday, book Ego Is the Enemy
“The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided…never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.” -Herman Hesse, book Siddhartha
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” -Zen Buddhist Proverb
Most of the time, when we think of ego or attachment, we think of traditional worldly pursuits like fame, fortune, power, beauty, status, etc…
But equally as insidious is being attached to the idea that you’re someone who’s “above all” such pursuits. That you’re “holier than thou.” Self righteousness and judging others is not a good look.
The truth is that we’re all at times, saints and sinners. The key is to be aware. Awareness gets us back on track.
The baseball player Shawn Green reminds us of this in his excellent book, The Way Of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH. An excerpt below (a longer one, but worth reading)…
During my time in Los Angeles, I’d experienced the give and take between staying in the moment and getting caught up in the ego. Each time I thought I had it figured out, the little man would come up with a new way to wedge himself between me and the present moment. And each time I’d eventually find my way back again by chopping wood during my daily routines. But as I struggled through the first half of the 2003 season, I came to believe that the more pain I endured the more my ego might be diminished. I thought suffering would bring me what I was looking for.
That’s not how it worked.
Instead, I’d grown resentful. I began to feel superior to players who pulled themselves out of the lineup due to minor injuries. I took pride in the fact that I’d never gone on the disabled list, not even when Andy Pettite broke that bone in my wrist with a fastball back in ’99. Plenty of players get sore backs when they’re coming up against a Randy Johnson–quality pitcher or when they’re swinging poorly. I never did that. And so I came to believe I was better than those other players because I thought I didn’t have an ego big enough to concern itself with things like slumps or ducking pitchers.
But wait … I thought I was better than others?
Isn’t that ego, too?
It suddenly became clear to me. Over the past few years, I’d succumbed to an image of myself as an antisuperstar. I’d always been self-consciously careful to suppress my emotions during the great times and to unapologetically face the music during the bad times. I’d shunned many opportunities for endorsements and increased fame that being a sports star in Los Angeles offered. I’d taken pride in showing up to spring training much thinner than other power hitters, many of whom were later revealed to be steroid users, because I knew that my relative lightness highlighted the fact that I still could hit the ball farther than almost all of them. Sitting by myself in that training room office, it finally dawned on me: I was just as caught up in the image of myself as a humble, antisuperstar as other players were caught up in their images of themselves as traditional superstars!
How could I not have seen this?
I had chosen to tolerate the disillusionment of management, the media, and fans, rather than simply to acknowledge my shoulder injury because I had believed that a tolerance for painful criticism illustrated the conquering of my ego’s need to be a top hitter in baseball. What I didn’t realize, however, was that by doing these things I was actually feeding a new identity that my ego had chosen for me, that of the enlightened, spiritually superior athlete. By publicly saying, “Don’t look at me,” I was in effect saying, “Look at me!” Cultivating a feeling of spiritual superiority to my steroid-juiced, tabloid-seeking colleagues, I was, in a subtler way, as fully engaged in the ego as they were. I lost touch with presence as surely as if I had dressed in a gold suit and paid to have my face on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.
Once again, how tricky the ego is!
And so just as overdoing my tee work damaged my shoulder, my self-conscious attempts to combat my ego had been overdone to the point of actually creating a whole new persona (a pure exercise in ego!). My subsequent attachment to this image was no different from the player who wants to be known as the greatest of all time. Both images are mere fantasies that promise a happier and more fulfilling future, denying the precedence of the present moment. Sure, some might suggest that my aims were somehow inherently more admirable than the guy who’s after mere fame and a truck-load of money, but I disagree, as both I and the stereotypically driven athlete were looking to become something rather than simply to be.
Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade. In 2000, I’d fallen into the ego’s trap of, “you need to be the hero,” and now that I’d injured my shoulder, I’d fallen into the ego’s new trap of being the unappreciated antisuperstar.
The fight is never ending.
Was my immoderate labeling of the ego as an evil enemy where I’d gone wrong? After all, the problem is not the ego itself, which is almost impossible to permanently quash, but getting lost in the ego and falsely identifying it as one’s own true essence. Might simply being aware of the ego and watching it from a place of separation and space be enough to keep oneself present?
I realized now that I’d doubtless get lost in the ego again—many times—but that as long as I was able to wake up to the present moment I’d always find my way back. Just recognizing the ego for what it is means that you’re not completely lost in it.
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