When I started down the mindfulness path, Alan Watts’ name came up a lot, so I started reading him. It also helped connect the dots to one of my favorite Van Morrison songs – Alan Watts blues. I got curious. Lately, I’ve been listening to the “Being in the Way” podcast that Watts’ son Mark has produced. It is, essentially, many hours of his recorded talks.

So the other morning, I’m driving to work, and listening, when he said it: You are not separate from the world, just as a whirlpool is not separate from the stream. I had to sit with that. A whirlpool looks like a thing — distinct, bounded, with its own shape and motion. But it has no existence apart from the water moving through it. It is the river, temporarily organized. Then it isn’t.

We are like that, Watts was saying. The self — the “I” we defend and protect and center everything around — is not a fixed object moving through the world. It is the world, briefly taking this particular form. The ego that insists otherwise is not lying exactly. It’s just confused about what it is. For a long time, I’ve been thinking about this notion of integration vs. separateness. I think we are all just part of something much bigger than us/I.

I think my background in team sports has proven this idea out many times to me. On a lacrosse field in Marion, Massachusetts, this past spring, I witnessed it again.

Tabor Academy (my alma mater, and the place I grew up) had a good team. Talented, experienced, capable of winning every game on their schedule. Mid-season, they lost one maybe shouldn’t have. The film didn’t lie: they were playing for themselves. The whirlpools had forgotten the river.

The next day, I was scheduled to do a team building exercise with them. We divided them into three groups of about ten. Coaches pre-assigned each player to write about one teammate — why are you grateful for him, what qualities do you admire — and they were told what they wrote would be read aloud. They had fifteen minutes. I told them to dig deep.

Then each player handed what he’d written to the one he’d written about. And that player read it aloud, to the group.

What happened in that room is hard to describe and easy to feel if you’ve ever been in one like it. The words were specific, honest, sometimes halting. A few players teared up. The coaches, present and watching, saw something shift. The positive energy in that space was not manufactured — it was released. That night, the head coach told me some of the players had texted him. The team, they said, had never felt happier.They didn’t lose again. They won 11 straight and the league title.

Credit belongs to the coaches, who created a culture where something like this could take root. The exercise was a spark.

I’ve done this exercise before, with a college team of fifty. It was just as moving — maybe more so, given the scale. One of the Tabor assistant coaches had been on that college team. He remembered what it had done to him as a player. That’s partly why we brought it here. Gratitude passed forward. The river, moving.

What I’ve learned, doing this more than once: expressing gratitude is powerful. But witnessing it may be equally so. When you watch someone receive words they didn’t know they needed, something loosens in you too. The boundary between “my experience” and “their experience” gets thin. That’s not sentiment. That’s the whirlpool remembering the stream.

Teams that win — really win, down the stretch when it matters — are almost always the most selfless ones. This is one of the great lessons sport teaches, if we let it. Not because selflessness is a virtue to be rewarded, but because a team that has dissolved its internal separateness functions as a single organism. The pass arrives before it’s asked for. The defensive rotation happens without a word. Everyone knows where everyone else is, because on some level they are not entirely separate from each other anymore. A team enters flow.

This is true beyond sport. No marriage thrives when one partner holds “I” at the center. No family, no town, no country — nothing that requires more than one human being — functions well when the whirlpools forget they share a river. And we all share a river. It’s called the universe.

So how do you practice this? How do you loosen the ego’s grip — not permanently, not dramatically, just enough to feel the current you’re part of?

A few small gestures, offered not as prescriptions but as invitations:

Acknowledge a stranger. Not a transaction — a moment of actual recognition. You are here. I see you. That’s enough. Start doing it. It makes you feel better. Makes the stranger feel better too.

Tend to something in nature. A plant, a bird feeder, a stretch of trail. Care for something that cannot thank you. Be connected to it.

Look up. On a clear night, find the stars and stay with them long enough to feel small. Not diminished — small in the way the whirlpool is small. Part of something incomprehensibly large, and therefore, somehow, held.

None of this requires a philosophy degree or a meditation cushion. It requires only a willingness to loosen, briefly, the self-ish story that you are separate. That the “I” at the center of everything is the whole story.

It isn’t. Because you are the river, and the whirlpool.

— Pete

Notes arrive on Sundays and some Wednesdays

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About my book, The Why of Sports → here