The Element (12 page)

Let’s go back to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. In Shakespeare’s play
Hamlet
, the prince of Denmark is torn by raging feelings about the death of his father and the treachery of his mother and uncle. Throughout the play, he wrestles with his feelings about life and death, loyalty and betrayal, and his significance in the wider universe. He struggles to know what he should think and feel about the events that are engulfing his spirit. Early in the play, he greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two visitors to the royal Danish court. He welcomes them with these words:

 

The question surprises Guildenstern. He asks Hamlet what he means by “prison.” Hamlet says, “Denmark’s a prison.” Rosencrantz laughs and says that if that’s true, then the whole world is a prison. Hamlet says it is, and “a goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.” Rosencrantz says, “We think not so, my lord.” Hamlet’s reply is profound. “ ’Tis none to you for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.”

The power of human creativity is obvious everywhere, in the technologies we use, in the buildings we inhabit, in the clothes we wear, and in the movies we watch. But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it.

Unlike all other species, so far as we can tell, we don’t just get on in the world. We spend much of our time talking and thinking about what happens and trying to work out what it all means. We can do this because of the startling power of imagination, which underpins our capacity to think in words and numbers, in images and gestures, and to use all of these to generate theories and artifacts and all the complex ideas and values that make up the many perspectives on human life. We don’t just see the world as it is; we interpret it through the particular ideas and beliefs that have shaped our own cultures and our personal outlook. All of these stand between us and our raw experiences in the world, acting as a filter on what we perceive and how we think.

What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be. This is what Hamlet means when he says, “There is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so.” The good news is that we can always try to think differently. If we create our worldview, we can re-create it too by taking a different perspective and reframing our situation. In the sixteenth century, Hamlet said that he thought of Denmark metaphorically as a prison. In the seventeenth century, Richard Lovelace wrote a poem for his love, Althea. Taking the opposite view, Lovelace says that for him an actual prison would be a place of freedom and liberty so long as he could think of Althea. This is how he closes his poem:

 

In the nineteenth century, William James became one of the founding thinkers of modern psychology. By then, it was becoming more widely understood that our ideas and ways of thinking could imprison or liberate us. James put it this way: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind. . . . If you change your mind, you can change your life.”

This is the real power of creativity and the true promise of being in your Element.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the Zone

EWA LAURANCE is the most famous female billiards player on the planet. Known as “the Striking Viking,” she has been ranked number 1 in the world, won both the European and U.S. national championships, has appeared on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
, been featured in
People
,
Sports Illustrated
,
Forbes
, and many other publications, makes regular television appearances, and serves as a commentator on ESPN.

Growing up in Sweden, Ewa discovered the game while trailing after her older brother.

“Me and my best friend, Nina, we were always hanging around, just as close as friends can be. One day, when I was fourteen, the two of us followed my brother and his friend to this bowling alley to play and decided to check it out. We were there for a while and then got really bored. And then we found out that they had gone to something called a poolroom. I had never heard of pool. We followed them up there and I remember, the minute I walked in, I reacted to it right away. I loved the whole thing—this dark room with lights over each table and the clicking of the balls. I just thought it was mesmerizing right off the bat.

“There was this whole society there where everybody knew this thing about billiards and it grabbed me right away. We were intimidated and curious, but just sat and watched everything. When you sit and watch it, or do it yourself, everything disappears. It’s easy for that to happen with billiards because each table is a stage. So, everything around it disappeared for me and that’s all I saw. I was watching these players who knew exactly what they were doing. I realized that there’s more to this than just banging the balls around and hoping something goes in. There was one guy who ran ball, after ball, after ball, and made sixty, seventy, eighty balls in a row and I realized he was moving the white ball around to shoot his next shot. And somehow, it clicked in. It was their knowledge and skill that really amazed me—that chess part of billiards, of playing three, four moves ahead and then having to execute it on top of it.”

From that moment of epiphany, Ewa knew that she wanted to dedicate her life to billiards. Fortunately, her parents supported her, allowing her to spend six to ten hours a day playing at a local poolroom, doing her homework in between shots. “People there knew I was serious about the game, so they left me alone. But we also had a lot of fun there. If you find a place where everybody else likes the same thing that you do, it really becomes fun. So these odd characters—because we all had billiards together—we became like a family.”

In 1980, at sixteen, Ewa won the Swedish championship. At seventeen, she won the first-ever European Women’s Championship. This led to an invitation to go to New York to represent Europe in the World Championship. “That whole summer I practiced. The poolroom didn’t open until five in the afternoon, so I would take the bus in the morning up to the part of town where the owner lived, get the key to the poolroom, and then take the bus into town and let myself in. I did that all summer and then played ten, twelve hours a day. Then I went to the tournament in New York. I didn’t win, though; I came in seventh. I was disappointed I didn’t do better, but at the same time I thought, ‘Wow, that’s like seventh in the world!’ ”

Though her parents didn’t like her being so far away, Ewa decided to stay in New York to continue her pursuit of the sport, knowing that in the United States, she would have the opportunity to play regularly against the best in the world. In addition to scoring victories, she also became a leading voice for women in billiards. Her talent, her passion, and her stunning good looks made her a media star and helped bring new levels of popularity to the game she loved.

Fame and financial reward accompanied Ewa Laurance on her rise to the top. But for her, the biggest charge continued to be the game itself.

“You’re almost unconscious to what’s going on around you. It’s literally the most peculiar feeling. It’s like being in a tunnel but you don’t see anything else. You just see what you’re doing. Time changes. Somebody could ask you how long you’ve been doing it and you could have said twenty minutes but it was actually nine hours. I just don’t know. I have never had it with anything before or since, even though I am very passionate about a lot of other things. But the feeling of playing billiards is unique for me.

“Part of the beauty that pool offers you is how much you can learn. It’s a never-ending deal. Every layout is different, so there’s always something to keep you interested. I just love the physics and the geometry of it—learning and understanding the angles and finding out how far you can push to change the angle to get the cue ball where you want it to go. And learning what the limits and possibilities are. Being able to control the cue ball scooting forward two and a half inches instead of three is a pretty amazing feeling. So instead of fighting the elements, you actually figure out a way to work with them.

“I wasn’t at all interested or good at geometry or physics at school. For some reason, when I’m playing I see it a lot. I look at the table and I literally see lines and diagrams all over the place. I see ‘I’m going to make the 1 here, the 2 over here, the 3’s going to go down here, I’m going to have to go three rails around for the 4, the 6 is down here, no problem, I’ve got 7, 8, 9, I’m out.’ I see them all lined up. And then if you hit one ball a little bit incorrectly, all of a sudden a whole new diagram in your head pops up. You need to resolve the problem because you’re not where you wanted to be. You were six inches off, so now you have to reformulate the whole thing.

“Geometry at school did not get my attention. Maybe if I’d had a different teacher it would have been different—somebody that just said, ‘Ewa, think of it this way,’ or, ‘Look at it this way and you will get it.’ Or they could have taken our whole class to a poolroom and said, ‘Check this out!’ But it was so boring at school. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open in class, you know? But now, when I give lessons to someone, I try to figure out as quickly as I can if they have hand-eye coordination and also, are they just interested in the game or are they interested in the geometry and the physics of it. Are they math-oriented.”

Ewa has been playing billiards professionally for nearly thirty years. Yet she still gets the same charge that the sport has always given her. “Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, ‘Well you’ve done it so many times.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s about being in that moment.”

Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to face with the Element.

To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element. Doing what we love can involve all sorts of activities that are essential to the Element but are not the essence of it—things like studying, organizing, arranging, limbering up, etc. And even when we’re doing the thing we love, there can be frustrations, disappointments, and times when it simply doesn’t work or come together. But when it does, it transforms our experience of the Element. We become focused and intent. We live in the moment. We become lost in the experience and perform at our peak. Our breathing changes, our minds merge with our bodies, and we feel ourselves drawn effortlessly into to the heart of the Element.

Aaron Sorkin is the writer of two Broadway plays,
A Few Good Men
and
The Farnsworth Invention
; three television series,
Sports Night
,
The West Wing
, and
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
; and five feature films,
A Few Good Men
,
Malice
,
The American President
,
Charlie Wilson’s War
, and the soon-to-be-released
Trial of the Chicago 7
. He’s been nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards, eight Golden Globes, and the Academy Award for Best Picture.

“I never set out to be a writer,” he told me. “I always saw myself as an actor. I got an acting degree at college. I was so passionate about this that when I was in high school, I’d take the train into New York City when I was broke and wait until the second half of a play when there would be empty seats to sneak into after the intermission. Writing for fun was not something I was ever introduced to. It always seemed like a chore. I had written one sketch for a college party and my teacher, Gerard Moses, had said to me, ‘You could do this for a living, you know, if you wanted.’ But I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
Do what?
I thought, and moved on.

“A few months after I left school, a friend of mine was going out of town. He had his grandfather’s antique typewriter and asked me to hang onto it for him. At this time I was paying a friend of mine fifty dollars a week to sleep on his floor in a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. I’d got a job with a children’s theater company for a while and some work on a soap. This was in 1984 and I was doing the rounds of auditions.

“This particular weekend all of my friends were out of town. It was one of those Friday nights in New York where you feel like everyone but you has been invited to a party. I was broke, the TV wasn’t working, and all there was to do was muck around with this piece of paper and the typewriter. I sat down at it and wrote from nine o’clock at night until noon the next day. I fell in love with it all.