Pool Hall with Feeling

My emotional experience of playing pool at Sacco's starts long before I leave the house. I was sitting around this morning (Saturday), working on grading and responses for my Environmental Psychology class, and I noticed that it was about 10:45. Sacco's opens on Saturdays at 10:30. Gee, I could be there already... I'll do a couple more of these... gee, it's almost 11:30... maybe I can leave the rest of these until after I get home...

I have a real anticipation about this. Interestingly, it's not because playing pool is "fun." But I'll talk more about that later.

Finally, I pick up my cue case and ball case and walk out to the car. I take the same northward route up Bow Street to Dexter to Broadway to PowderHouse Square for all kinds of trips -- to the grocery store, to the gym, to leave town for Western Mass... but it feels different when I go this way to play pool. It's almost gravitational, like I'm being pulled down the road.

Lots of traffic toward the end of the trip today — there's some kind of marching band festival today in Davis Square. My normal street down to parking is closed off. I keep driving southward until I come to a street that takes me over to Mass Ave, then loop back and miraculously find a parking space immediately outside the door of Sacco's.

In martial arts (at least in Tae Kwon Do, the one I used to do), there's a sequence of starting a session that's intended to help you leave the world behind. The dressing room is at the back, so you come in, bow toward the Korean flag, and walk around the mats to the changing area. You change out of your street clothes and into your gi, walk back out to the mats, and bow again to the Korean flag and to the master. In its own way, Sacco's has for me that same sequence that allows me to externalize everything else and just be present. Cleaning out pockets and putting everything on the side table... screwing the cue together and taking out chalk... putting balls on the table, cleaning lint off the cloth... filling the water bottle... and I'm ready. It's a four- or five-minute ritual that helps me close off the world.

It's Saturday, so nothing but practice. I have nothing specific I need to work on today except the ability to sharpen my focus. I'm seeing the pocket-to-ball line exquisitely well today, and when I go down to shoot, I'm watching the cue ball hit my contact point very well. It's kind of like meditation, where you're supposed to do nothing but focus on your breathing. Try that for ten breaths, and you'll almost always find that your mind has wandered after three or four. Pool is like that. Focus on nothing but the contact point. When I don't think about my stroke, my stroke is better. I'm able to stop the cue ball almost effortlessly, or draw it backward several feet, or have it die softly against the side rail. All by setting what I want to do in my mind before I go down, and then seeing nothing but the contact point on the object ball. I'm regularly making shots I struggled with even a month ago — back cuts, banks, dead rails, long safeties — just because I'm seeing more attentively.

A psychologist, Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, has written extensively about an experience he calls "flow," in which you lose track of time, in which your normal sensory perception is distorted (like seeing the line on the table), in which you no longer think but simply do. Flow isn't fun, it isn't hard, it isn't challenging... it just is. When you try to make flow happen, you keep it from happening. It is an emotional experience, in its own way, but it's not pleasure.

A hundred years ago this year, some Japanese scientists challenged the notion that we only have four tastes (based on specific chemistry of taste buds on different parts of the tongue) — sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. They showed that there was a fifth one, which they called umami, or "richness;" the kind of savory intensity we associate with Portabello mushrooms, for instance, or beef stock, or a strong Cheddar cheese. Flow is kind of like the umami of the emotional range; hard to describe in everyday terms, but wholly distinctive and unmistakable.

Playing pool is one of the very few things I ever do in which I think of nothing else while I'm doing it. I'm not worried about work, I'm not thinking about my partner or our cats, I'm not thinking about money or credit card payments. It's all umami...