Day of the Dead

It was the Day of the Dead yesterday. I went to look up the significance of the holiday and came upon the idea of syncretism. Syncretism is the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different schools of thought, cultures, or religions.

I can’t help but see hockey as some combination of, as I have written before, the physical contact of American football, the turn-taking of baseball with the marksmanship of archery, the cooperation of soccer with the generosity of basketball, all built on the deftness of tightrope walking. These all relate to physical elements of the game.

Going deeper through the lens of tightrope walking we are most apt to understand Smushkin’s hockey agility. The variety of arm movements without stick exemplify the balancing act that is performed by our hands at most if not all moments. This act is simply crippled by the game today.

Walking on a tight rope requires total momentary organization with an imagination for the next moments. Thus the most dangerous and joyful hockey game will arise when players accept through their hands, as well as impose by their hands, the tightrope that we accept beneath our feet. If the goal is to walk successfully from one end of the tightrope to another, can a tightrope walker ever hold or force one step in particular without sacrificing this goal? Transforming a particular step into the goal sacrifices synchronizing the successful walk.

Modern Dreamers

“Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?” Chesterton’s Orthodoxy p.267

The reflective instinct is the edge of dignity. The contours of the game are aligned then. A reflective element in player ability is the highest form of cooperation and competitiveness. It pushes the game to the furthest arc of its development.

Agere Contra

https://youtu.be/90gP3d-K920?si=mnRlQzO6QKugMccg

Bishop Barron mentions agere contra as acting against our attachments to do his will. The purposeful pursuit of playing and being played, sharing and growing. Then at minute 3:25 he mentions Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, of a stick bent in one direction— Aristotle believes the entelechy of humans is we naturally want to be knowledgeable and social.

Two Way hockey agility adopts sticks bent in either direction, coinciding like clockwork, and then ultimately straight to create the furthest and finest development curve for ice hockey players and the game.

songwriting

“I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it… I’m not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song. It’s a particular art form that has its own rules. It’s a different type of thing.” -Bob Dylan

Ed Reed vs Paton Manning

Piggy backing off of my last post with Deion Sanders here is an interesting video about opponent processing from two NFL greats.

https://youtu.be/GQrZKveWgOk?si=FTeypultXzQVsVAx

Thought processes and game richness in hockey can be enhanced by more reflection individually to overcome the forcefulness that handicaps the game at this moment. Thanks, Harry, for pointing me to spirit over strength and power.

Deion Sanders

As a two way player he spoke to being better on offense having played defense and being better on defense for having played offense. He knew the intricacies of the positions more. There’s something essential about this reflective element one can develop.

https://youtu.be/8Z8244-TWKQ?si=-BrrK-NWplcj6UbV

Common sense

Is there a deep common sense in hockey that’s shared with other sphere’s of life?

Are there alignments in play that create a coherent intertextuality so players may enrich themselves with natural knowledge and go on to fortify communal linchpins? Or do the dynamics in hockey operate in a vacuum only known by those who ‘know’ the game.

Is this not the essence of the team concept we so dearly, ardently stride out to create common ties that bind teammates? There is something deeper in hockey worth sharing. It’s not be coveted though it is at the moment.

Accurate translation

“Communication is a prerequisite to problem-solving and one of the most fundamental skills in life. Communication can be defined as mutual understanding. The main problem in communication is the translation problem: translating what we mean into what we say, and translating what we say into what we mean. The first challenge, therefore, is to learn to say what we mean; the second challenge is to learn to listen so that we understand what others mean. The key to ‘accurate translation’, or effective two-way communication is high trust. You can communicate with someone you trust almost without words, you can even make mistakes in verbal communication and still find that they get your meaning. But when the trust level is low you’ll find it that it really makes little difference how hard you try to communicate, how good you are in technique, how clear your language is. When trust is high communication is easy, effortless instantaneous, and accurate. When trust is low communication is extremely difficult exhausting and ineffective. The key to communication is trust and the key to trust is trustworthiness. Living a life of integrity is the best guarantee of maintaining the climate of effective communication. As with all natural processes, there are no shortcuts, no quick fixes.” From Principle Centered Leadership by Covey p138

Acceptance

You either believe in the fundamental ingenuity that lies within the human spirit or you think Hockey can only be played by a single handedness. I am not an anomaly, I am not special.

https://twitter.com/rainmaker1973/status/1675171710096556033?s=46&t=lM2Qyveu4tQ_jpyf4SzQwQ

Play For

Who are you playing or coaching for?

Your ‘Teammates’ is a common reply. But do the manners that players play with reflect this belief?

My game plateaued in my first season at the NTDP without being afforded the opportunity to iterate in a reciprocal manner across time. The process of how I entered games, explored playing and played games was corrupted by a poor time sensitivity or said another way lacking a context that invoked a traditionally valuable development fugue. I wanted play with my teammates.

This post is inspired by the following Jordan Peterson video where he also mentions the character woven into the fabric of two way hockey.. eenjoy

https://youtu.be/MRUqcIE_wHk

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Understand

To understand two way hockey, you must understand two way hockey.

Balancing Conflict

“Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure. It is not just that we live too much by variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.” MacIntyre After Virtue p.235

Creative Spirit

General Carl Von Clausewitz examined the nature of war and highlighted three distinct characteristics two of which I will focus on.

One- war is comprised of the same “blind natural forces” of “primordial violence” observed in nature.

Two- war contains “the play of chance and probability” rewarding “creative spirits”.

Hockey’s play with #1 has finished. It’s time for #2 to take center stage.

Abusive Categorization

We watched Fire of Love last night a movie about Katie and Maurice Krafft, a husband and wife pair of volcanologists. The movie shares the videos and photos from their archives telling the story of their adventures watching unique lava flows and splatterings around the globe. It’s a good movie, I recommend it.

At one point Maurice mentioned the ‘abusive categorizations’ thrusted upon volcanoes by scientists that strip volcanoes of their identities and deprive a meaning behind studying them. For instance volcanoes are often simply shown to be either ‘red’ or ‘gray’ volcanoes with the color categorization signifying whether the earth’s fault at the rupture point is either diverging (red) or converging (gray) making for bespoke rupture characteristics. But a volcanoe’s story goes much deeper than this categorization as Maurice eludes to. Its even mentioned how the speed and magnitude of a rupture we still cannot measure beforehand.

So Maurice proposes a relational orientation that inspires his work and peaks the interest of all volcano enthusiasts. He reveals how categorization is only useful to a point and that you must go beyond them echoing Piaget.