The A’s have a two-run lead. They are two innings away from their first World Series championship in 15 years. They are batting in the top of the eighth, with two runners on base.

Dave Henderson is at the plate.

Hendu has seen leads like this evaporate in the postseason before. His own homer off Donnie Moore. Bill Buckner’s error. Kirk Gibson’s homer. He was on the field for all of those improbable comebacks.

Hendu knows what’s at stake here. The A’s were leading 8-0 in this game, and now it’s 8-6. Those potential runs that are out there on first and second bases are very important. Driving those runs in, or not, could be the difference between a championship, and another agonizing defeat.

The Giants’ best reliever, Steve Bedrosian, is summoned from the bullpen to face Hendu. Hendu gets ahead in the count, 3-1, but then Bedrosian rears back and paints two blazing fastballs on the outside corner. Hendu fouls these perfect pitches off.

So here we are, a full count, with two outs. The runners will be going.

What does Hendu do?

Here’s what Hendu does: he yawns.

* * *

Dave Henderson passed away this weekend. He was only eight years older than me.

I’m about to turn 50. Unavoidably, my thoughts recently have been turning towards mortality. Before, when athletes my age or younger who have passed away, I could always find some thing about their deaths that I could dismiss as irrelevant to me. They had a genetic defect, or were freakishly large. They were addicted to drugs or alcohol. They played a violent sport where they repeatedly bash their brains against their skulls.

But I haven’t been able to shake off Dave Henderson’s death. Partly because he basically died of the kind of thing people die of when they die of old age: organ failure. It is hitting me now that death can come at any time now. It may come 50 years from now, but it may come in just eight. Or it may come tomorrow.

And I also have been unable to shake of Dave Henderson’s death because I loved the guy. If you were an A’s fan in the 80s and 90s, you loved, loved, loved Dave Henderson.

God, I loved Hendu. I miss Hendu.

* * *

My peak as an A’s fan corresponded to the years that Dave Henderson patrolled center field for the A’s, 1988-93. I must have gone to 30-40 games a year those years. And I always sat out in the left-center bleachers, between the two (unrelated) Hendersons, Dave in center and Rickey in left.

It was a wonderful time. Yes, it was a happy era because the A’s were a great team those years. But the joy also came from Dave Henderson himself.

There have been players before and since who acknowledge and are grateful for and interact with their fans. But I have yet to see a player who could rival Hendu to the degree in which he actually, genuinely liked his fans. At any time, before, during, and after any game, he was ready and willing to interact with the fans behind him in the outfield. He’d sit in the bleachers during batting practice sometimes. He’d go out to dinner with fans after a game. And there was always a lot of joking banter between pitches.

I particularly loved the start of the game. Hendu would come out at the top of the first inning to warm up with a big smile on his face. He’d take the ball out of his glove, and wave it over his head at us in left-center, and then to his two(!) groups of fans in right-center: Henduland and Hendu’s Bad Boy Club. And then Hendu’s Bad Boy Club would launch their “Hendu is a bad boy” chant, and the game was on.

It was a ritual that said to you, every game: isn’t this great? Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this life just a joy to be living?

We need more rituals like that.

* * *

“Are you happy, Daddy?”

My eight-year-old daughter asks me this question a lot. She is the closest thing I have seen to Dave Henderson since Dave Henderson. People who only intermittently interact with her often ask, “Is she ever not happy?”

Of course, I see her so much that I know that she is not always happy. She has her pet peeves that set her off, make her grumpy. But her default mode is happy. She is, by default, smiling, excited, happy to see you. She is quite popular as a result. Happiness is infectious.

* * *

My default emotion is not happiness. It’s…I don’t know…satisfaction? I’m satisfied. Things are fine. I’m calm. I’m OK. But happiness doesn’t come easily or naturally for me.

Satisfaction is not infectious. People don’t flock to other satisfied people. I will never be as missed when I am gone as Dave Henderson is. It just doesn’t work that way.

Why is that? Why are the Dave Hendersons of the world the exception and not the rule? Why was Dave Henderson extraordinary instead of ordinary? Why can’t we all be more like Dave Henderson, or my daughter, and be joyous all the time?

* * *

This is a Swedish short film called “The Egg“. It’s a beautiful film, which presents a lovely way to look at why there are so many different kinds of people in the world.

You don’t need to believe in the Hindu idea of reincarnation to appreciate what a beautiful idea this is. Perhaps I’m not capable of being as joyous as Dave Henderson, or my daughter, because my soul simply isn’t as mature as theirs is.

Which means we have a dual responsibility to each other: theirs is to lead by example, to give our souls something to aspire to become in our future lives. Ours is to not turn them backwards, to not drag them back down to our more unripened levels.

* * *

The Hindu religion presents four main aspects, or goals, of human life: kama, dharma, artha, and moksha. Now, I’m not Hindu, so this is not my religion, but I am a believer in finding the underlying truths of any religion, and translating them into a form that you can understand. As God said in the film above, every religion is true in its own way.

So let’s take these aspects of Hinduism, and translate them (sort of like what the Pixar short Sanjay’s Super Team did) into a form we can understand: what these concepts mean in a baseball context. And let’s pick Oakland A’s players to represent each of these concepts.

Let’s call this framework Henduism:

• Kama.

  Kama represents our desire and longing for emotional, sensual and aesthetic pleasures. In Henduism, Kama is represented by Yoenis Cespedes.

  Cespedes, when measured objectively, was never an all-star quality player with the A’s. His statistical results were perhaps slightly above average. He wasn’t a star hitter because he chased high fastballs too much, leaving him vulnerable to various forms of pitch sequencing. Defensively, he often took bad routes on fly balls, and sometimes clanked the balls that fell in his glove. He didn’t read pitchers very well on the bases, so he was a poor basestealer, despite his speed.

  But oh my goodness, what a talent. In an A’s uniform, he was simply beautiful human being to watch, even in failure. If he dropped a ball in the outfield, he would often make up for it by launching a frozen rope to the next base as the player tried to advance. When rounding the bases, there was a spellbinding grace to his form when he ran with a full head of steam. And when his bat did make contact with the ball, the result was often the most majestic of home runs.

  If there is a baseball equivalent of lust, Yoenis Cespedes induced that feeling.

   

• Dharma.

  Dharma is the quality of conducting yourself virtuously according to the the duties, rights, and laws of your society. In baseball terms, it means “playing the game the right way.” In Henduism, Dharma is represented by Mark Ellis.

  Ellis spent nearly a decade in an A’s uniform, a rarity in the tenure of Billy Beane, who swaps players in and out like a card dealer flips over playing cards. In many ways, Ellis was the opposite of Cespedes. Ellis rarely did anything that tickled your aesthetic senses and made you say “Wow!” He was an ordinary-looking athlete of ordinary size and strength and speed. But in those ten years, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times Ellis made a mental mistake. He was always in the right place at the right time, making the right decision of where to be, of where to throw the ball or not throw the ball, of whether to take the extra base or to stay put.

  You knew exactly what you were getting with Mark Ellis when you wrote him into the lineup. You could always rely on Mark Ellis, because he always played the game the right way.

   

• Artha.

  Artha refers to the goal of reaching prosperity and success. In Henduism, Artha is represented by Rickey Henderson.

  If the goal of baseball is to score runs, then nobody has achieved that goal more than Rickey Henderson. Rickey holds the all-time record for most runs scored in a career.

  But there’s more to Rickey than that. Rickey was the full package. He could hit for average, he could work the count and get on base with a walk (OMG could he do that), he could hit for power (most home runs ever leading off a game), he could steal bases (single-season and career records in that, too), and he could play defense, too. As Bill James famously said, you could split Rickey in two, and you’d have two hall-of-famers. And he also won a couple of World Series, to boot.

  If your goal is winning, and you were picking an A’s player in history to build your team around, Rickey would be your first pick.

   

• Moksha.

  The goal of Moksha is to make real the kind of the person you were meant to be. This can only follow from a liberation or release from the fears and burdens of everyday life.

  Moksha is represented in Henduism by Dave Henderson.

* * *

“There’s not really much pressure when you’re supposed to make an out. And I guess I’m the only one who realizes that. So, I have a distinct advantage in that everybody else on the field is pressured, and I’m not.”

—Dave Henderson

Hendu yawned.

Dave Henderson would often do this in a tense situation in a ballgame. He’d take a step out of the batter’s box for a moment, and let loose a nice big yawn.

Then, relaxed, liberated by the yawn from the pressure of the situation, he’d get back into the batter’s box and face the battle before him, as the best possible Dave Henderson he could be in that moment.

There are those who do not believe in clutch hitters. But Dave Henderson hit .324/.410/.606 over the four World Series he played in. You may think that’s just the luck of the statistical draw. I do not. I think it was Moksha.

* * *

Most of us are broken in some way. We have fears, anxieties, scars, built up over years of heartbreak and abuse and neglect and failures. We build psychological walls around ourselves to protect ourselves from these problems. Mine are certainly lesser than others. I’m sure many, many people have scars far worse than mine, with much thicker walls built up around them.

But here I am: a child of divorce and alcoholism, who got sent to a different country in a different climate with a different culture and a different language just as I was hitting puberty. I developed some psychological walls around myself as a result. I think I fear success (Artha) a bit too much, because I feel like it could be too easily taken away from me. I’m afraid of Kama, too, of being too amazing and sexy and strong, because losing that would be too painful, too. So I hide inside Dharma, doing my duties, behaving properly, probably a bit too much. I miss out on the other connections I could have.

* * *

I think most baseball players, like most of us normal human beings, have their own fears and anxieties and scars. A baseball career is a fragile thing. One small mechanical hitch could be the difference between being in the majors and being out of baseball. One hit a week is the difference between an all-star and an also-ran. Is there time, is there energy, to risk making emotional connections to the whole wide world, when every moment, every play, is so critical to success or failure?

But then there was Dave Henderson. Hendu could yawn in the face of pressure. Hendu had accepted his vulnerabilities, and released himself from the fear of failure. And because of that liberation, he could afford to smile and wave to an audience who watched his every move. And through that smile, and that wave, he lifted an entire fanbase.

* * *

“Are you happy, Daddy?” The wise old soul inside my young little daughter looks into my eyes, and intuits that I have not reached Moksha. I am not quite the person I could be, because I have not released myself from my fears and inhibitions. And most of all, I have not allowed myself the freedom to release myself from my biggest fear of all: that I will somehow mess up this responsibility of fatherhood, that I will play the parenting game in the wrong way, that I will throw some unnecessary scars onto her, and set back her beautiful soul.

She won’t accept my unhappiness. She wants more from me.

“Come on, Daddy, ” she says, and grabs my hand. She pulls, and my inertia yields. She lifts me out of my chair. A smile starts to form on my face.

“Let’s go play!”

“Steph Curry’s great. Steph Curry’s the MVP. He’s a champion. Understand what I’m saying when I say this. To a degree, he’s hurt the game. And what I mean by that is I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids and the first thing they do is run to the three-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of the game. People think that he’s just a knock-down shooter. That’s not why he’s the MVP. He’s a complete basketball player.”

—Mark Jackson

I’m more ghost now than man.

I’ll be turning 50 in a month. Of those 50 years, I’ve played soccer for maybe 42 years. I probably peaked physically at around age 27 or 28, as most human beings do. Which means that half my soccer-playing life, 21 of those 42 years, has been spent in the slow process of fading into a mere shadow of the player I used to be.

There was a time when I never worried about what was behind me. If I had half a step on an opponent, I was gone. No more. Every advantage I earn disappears quickly these days. Each decision I make takes much longer to execute. Younger players just read my eyes and get to where I plan to go before I do. My moves are all telegraphed, like an outdated metaphor trying to go viral on a brand new communications medium.

My ghosting is almost complete. The last lights on my neural relay are flickering.

* * *

I have a friend, Jeff Raz, who once was the lead clown in a Cirque du Soleil show, Corteo. Jeff played a clown imagining his own funeral. A procession of acrobats and jugglers and clowns arrive to play tribute to the dying clown, to give him a few last moments of amazingness before his time is up.

I’ve learned from watching him up close what a huge difference there is between a world-class clown in a world-class circus, and the amateur clown at your kid’s birthday party.

A top-level, world-class circus contains a wealth of jaw-dropping acrobats and jugglers and performers who push the limits of what the human body can do. But your jaw can only drop so many times before jaw-dropping becomes repetitive, and amazing becomes normal.

The job of the clown in a world-class circus is to push the reset button on amazingness. The clown taps into your natural ambition to do amazing things, but mistakingly focuses on an element of the preceding act which is not actually the source of its quality. So, for example, if a dancer does an acrobatic Fred Astaire act with a broom, a clown follows that act by trying to replicate that success by dancing with a vacuum cleaner.

Of course, the cleaning utensil was not the point of the preceding act; it was the skill and strength and artistry and precision of the dancer. The clown replicates the form of the act but not the quality, and in doing so, brings our expectation levels back down to those of the normal human being, so that the next act can wow us again.

* * *

In a way, then, your birthday party clown unintentionally makes the same mistake the the top-level clown makes on purpose: s/he imitates the form of the clown, with the makeup and the outfits, but often not the function or the quality. And it is this form without function which horror films use to turn clowning on its head, from a reset button on amazingness to a trigger for the grotesque side of human nature.

* * *

Every once in a while, an athlete comes along who drops our jaws, and changes the baseline of what we think is humanly possible. Right now, that athlete is Steph Curry.

The shooting, the dribbling, the shooting, the passing, and OMG the shooting — Curry dazzles us like no other basketball player has done before. With his human proportions amidst the giants of the NBA, Curry serves as both acrobat and clown in the same, complete package. It’s the greatest show on earth.

* * *

My youngest daughter is eight years old. I have coached her soccer team for a couple of years now. At first, the kids only understand the simplest element of soccer’s form: trying to kick the ball in the direction of the goal. A soccer game with six-year-olds is a clump of small human beings clustering around a ball as it pinballs around within the cluster. It is not exactly The Beautiful Game.

But now, two years later, I can see the kids’ eyes becoming open to the function of the game instead of just the form. The first time being aware of the game instead of just the ball. The movement into open space with a dribble. A reminder to a teammate not kick the ball into the middle of the field in front of your own goal. The first primitive attempts at passing the ball to an open teammate.

It’s like a closed flower beginning to open its petals to the sunlight.

* * *

Meanwhile, I keep playing, twice a week, getting worse and worse every time I play. I am one injury from hanging up my soccer cleats for good. Any time I step on the field now, it could be my last time.

But every once in a while, I still manage one more good run, one more nice pass, one more good shot, and the sun delays its setting for just one, brief, bittersweet moment.

But not everything can be avoided. Not forever. Times end, because they have to.

* * *

The young kids in the high school gym, chucking three pointers instead of playing beautiful basketball, they’re just inexperienced youngsters who see the form but don’t yet understand the function. With guidance, their time will come.

You may, if you choose, elect to judge children and old men against the standards of the peak human being, to compare amateurs and novices to professionals. You may elect to criticize their mistakes in an isolated snapshot, as unconnected events to be judged without context, each a single flawed image in a grotesque horror show, every one of which harms the potential perfection of the universe.

Or, you can join me and take a seat at the finest table in all the galaxy. Let us watch the beautiful circus of life, from naïve clowns to amazing acrobats to sad ghosts, march by. It’s my amazing funeral procession, and you’re all invited.

I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.

This was a revelation to me. All this time, I assumed that the primary purpose of lunch was lunch. All this time, I figured that I was just lousy at conversation because being an introvert made conversation awkward and laborious for me. For everyone else, conversation seems comparatively effortless. But it seems from this data that conversation must be harder for everyone else than I had assumed.

My oldest daughter is a freshman in college. She recently texted me and said she wanted to talk. I asked, what about? She got annoyed at me for asking.

I was clueless as to why. I guess the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to all of us, there’s always some area of life where we’re so incompetent we don’t even know we’re incompetent. This area, apparently, was one of mine.

She asked if we could just talk about something stupid. So I called her, and we talked about Donald Trump and the presidential race and stuff like that for a good long while. I didn’t ask about what was really bothering her.

Eventually, the conversation turned, and we finally got to talking about the thing she wanted to talk about. But that probably at least half an hour into the conversation. We segued slowly and organically from the stupid stuff into the real issue.

And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable. I’m very much a get-to-the-point kind of person. I tend to say what I mean, or nothing at all.

Language is imprecise. Our feelings don’t always have direct translations into speech. It’s hard to explain what we feel, to say exactly what we mean. We have wants and desires and emotions, and we often try to rationalize those feelings. Those rationalizations are often logically incoherent. But it’s hard to see the incoherence of our own rationalizations because our points of view are so limited. And often (if we’re not falling prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect) we intuit that our rationalizations may be incoherent. So we’re cautious in what we say. We know that there can be social penalties for saying the wrong thing in the wrong way to the wrong person.

All this adds up to making the act of talking about something sensitive daunting. There is a vulnerability in speaking. That’s why our culture has all these rituals and conventions around conversation, like idle chit-chat and coffee and such: to build enough trust in the environment where we can feel comfortable enough to overcome the vulnerability inherent in speech.

I never fully understood this before. I feel like everyone else understands it, though, because they act as if they do. But if they do, it must be an intuitive understanding, a grokking, not an explicit fact that people state out loud. Otherwise, I probably would have heard someone say it explicitly sometime before in the almost 50 years I’ve been in this earth.

Having now finally come to this understanding, it occurs to me that perhaps this is the great flaw with Twitter, why everyone I know on Twitter seems to eventually run into a wall with it. The 140-character format pushes you to get straight to the point. There is no room for the idle chit-chat and sips of coffee and other conversational rituals that let us dance around the sensitive issues. Without these rituals that are built into real-life human-to-human conversation, the problems with speech that those cultural rituals are designed to prevent come flooding in.

There is so much hair pulling and teeth grinding about what people should and should not say online, and how they should or should not say it. And maybe all that hair pulling and teeth grinding arise because our online conversational cultures, and the technological platforms they reside on, have not had the time to evolve into something that works, the way that our real-life conversational culture has.

There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.

And it also occurs to me that there is a value in stating explicitly the things that are mostly just intuited about human nature and human culture. I want to explore these sorts of things. There is a risk, though, a vulnerability, in stating these things. The people who intuitively grasp these things will feel as though I am insulting their intelligence by stating something so obvious it shouldn’t need saying. But it isn’t meant as an insult to their intelligence, it’s meant as an insult to mine. I need to say these things because I’m the one who doesn’t understand these things. I need them explained to myself.

Which is all a roundabout way of stating something that maybe could fit into a tweet: I plan to start saying things that aren’t obvious to me but may be obvious to others. Sorry if you fall into the latter category and I waste your time. Such is the risk of saying anything, ever. And sorry for the roundaboutness in getting to this point. I seemed to need it, for some strange reason.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

–W. Edwards Deming

The Marshmallow Test is one of the classic experiments in psychology. In 1972, Walter Mischel gave 600 preschoolers a choice of one marshmallow now, or if they could wait, two marshmallows 15 minutes later. When he followed those kids into adulthood, he found that the kids who could wait had much more success in life.

In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester added a little twist to the famous experiment. They preceded the marshmallow test with a promise about some crayons that was either broken, or kept.

It turns out that almost none of the kids who were given the unreliable offer ended up waiting for the extra marshmallow. Why should they? They already waited for a promised reward that didn’t come. The rational thing to do in an untrustworthy environment is to take any reward that is presented. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

As I wrote in Box 32 of my Forty-two Boxes essay, children are born trusting. They are totally helpless, they have no other choice but to trust. But then through life experiences, they gather data that can change that default setting of trust.

In my last blog entry, I quoted Mister Rogers saying, “One of the first things a child learns in a healthy family is trust.” This modified marshmallow test demonstrates is why trust is so important. Trust allows people to spend energy and resources now for a greater payoff later.

You are told if you do your homework now, in 10 years you’ll get to go to college, and in 15 years, you’ll have a great career. You are told if you work hard at your entry-level job now, and you will eventually get promoted into management later. But if you don’t trust what you are told, if you don’t trust these equations, if the data keeps telling you there’s a glass ceiling you’re unlikely to surpass, you’ll probably go do something else where the data tells you the odds of success are better.

This is why poverty, racism, sexism, and totalitarianism are so destructive. Not only because those things present roadblocks in and of themselves, but because they corrode the trust that a sacrifice now will be worth a payoff later. Both society as a whole and the individuals in it fail to achieve their potential, because people in an untrustworthy environment take fewer long-term risks, and receive correspondingly fewer long-term payoffs. The result is stagnation.

In my last post, 42 Boxes, I spent 17,000 words trying to get around to the point that the first principle of human morality is that humans are vulnerable, and that the antidote to that vulnerability is trust.

In 1969, Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers) addressed Congress. Early on in his address, he came right out and said this:

One of the first things a child learns in a healthy family is trust.

It didn’t take him 17,000 words to say the same thing I did, because Mister Rogers was a saint and a genius, and I, in comparison, am a dim-witted blowhard. He later adds:

If we can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.

The recipe for a healthy family, or a healthy society, is simple. Admit your feelings about your vulnerabilities, trust that you can talk about them, and you will be able to control these vulnerabilities in a constructive, not destructive, fashion. It’s not that complicated.

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