Going to my room, as told by Beth

Sometime in the 2014 season, Lou introduced the concept of “the room” to us. We each had our very own room, he explained, a private mental space where we could enter and exit. This was a place of calm, inner quiet; we could enter our rooms in order to focus, to remove ourselves from externalities. He warned us that the room is not necessarily easy to find, nor recognize. It takes a lot of mental energy to truly find the room, and even more so to remain in it for an effective duration.

The 2014 team needed this concept; we were a young team, full of earnest but unharnessed energy. For the rest of that season, Lou would often say in huddles, “Go to your rooms.” And we would all get quiet for a couple of minutes. I would always spend the first minute with my eyes shut tight, as if to manually erase my environment—the noises, smells, emotions of the game. After a while, I would have a glimpse of the room, my room, a place where I could exist in a self-contained consciousness.

Seconds later, it would be gone, and I’d be back to the huddle, the sweating bodies around me, the anxiety of failure resting heavy on us all.

∴

It took me the rest of that season, and much of the next, to find my room. Even now, it’s annoyingly elusive. I can remain there for a little bit, but as soon as I start to realize Holy smokes, I’m actually in the room!, it disappears, and I’m back where I started.

My room is not something that can be accurately described in the moment. For me, the room has functioned as something of a vacuum, a quiet nothingness. Any sort of meta-reflection ruins the effect. When I’m in the room, I do not think. I watch myself existing in space. It is not a first person narration but a third.

My room will probably change, with time just as I will. But for the present, here’s what it’s like:

∴

When I get there, it is relatively empty. The furnishings are bare—a box spring and mattress, a small desk in the corner. The walls are white. Beams of light stream through a small window on the far wall. They break against the tiled floor, also white.

When I get there, I sit on the floor, leaning against the bed. The desk has a chair, but I like the floor better. Sometimes I am hunched over, writing. Sometimes I turn to the window. Sometimes the light seems to illuminate the fragments of floating dust. This only occurs to me as beautiful afterwards, when I am out of the room.

When I get there, I have no plan. I just sit in that room of quiet and light.

-Bethany Kaylor

Thankfulness, as told by Weaver

I was taught all through my pre-university education that on the inside all people are equal.  The quintessential poster at my elementary school contained a black child, an Asian child, a Latino child, and a white child.  All together, all equal, all smiling.  In high school these images morphed to include different ways of dressing, suggestions one of the people depicted was gay, and a variety of body types.  Again, they screamed, “We are all the same.”  This is a hopeful and idealistic message for youth, at best.  At worst, it damages society by preparing those encultured with this idea of sameness to struggle to understand the difficulties faced by people with different realities.  If we are all the same, all equal, what are they, that other group or demographic, complaining about?  The answer lies in that initial assumption.  People are not all the same and do not all share the same privileges.  We come from different geographic, mental, emotional, and family backgrounds.  

My reality is not that of my teammates, however similar.  Fugue was the first organization I stumbled upon that embraced the differences of its members to create a strong organism.  Those of you who are on or connected to Fugue know that what I am referring to is the Clown Tent philosophy.  I won’t go into details of Clown Tent but to say that it champions the uniqueness of each individual and the importance of loving and accepting our teammates as they are.  My teammates and I have received the gift of a safe and supportive space to learn about our identities, discover priorities and passions, and change without stagnant preconceived notions of ourselves holding us back.  

Fugue 2014. A gift, indeed.

Fugue is not perfect.  There are implicit social pressures within the team, within any social organism, for people to participate in certain activities or fashion trends or ideologies.  What sets Fugue apart is that Fuguers are respected, accepted, and loved regardless of whether we choose to follow or resist a trend.  And this is the greatest gift I have received from Fugue.

-Lillian Weaver

Stories, as told by Lou Burruss

Lou Burruss, the man of many stories

Stories are an inherent part of who I am. I grew up in a family that spent a lot of time telling stories on each other and on grandparents and cousins. I guess where some families argue politics or talk sports or literature, my family told stories. Some were famous enough to have names like Why Burrusses Hate Whiners and When John Fernando Threw the Horse Over the Fence and others were obscure footnotes and remembrances; stories were and are the vernacular of my family. So much of my use of stories is from this tradition and was never a conscious decision. I have certainly doubted the efficacy of particular stories and stories in general, but I think a lot of that is my willingness to doubt the efficacy of everything. (If you never doubt your assumptions, how do you know they are worthwhile?) But since you asked me about stories, I’ve been digging into and pondering the whys and wherefores, retrospectively looking back at how I used stories and taking account.

When you are explaining something to someone, it isn’t enough to merely tell them the thing because it is very difficult for an idea in the abstract to stick and hold – the human brain doesn’t work like that. An idea needs to have context and structure and it needs to be able to attach to the existing context and structure within a person’s consciousness in order for it to hold. A story is a beautiful way to make this happen because it provides beauty and depth and complexity and a mental pictures; all of which make the point of the story easier to understand, embrace and remember. I am certainly not the first nor last practitioner of this. There is a reason that 1 Kings is easier to remember than Leviticus. Scheherazade lived. Stories are on a human scale and within the scope of human understanding.

There are some common themes that run through a lot of the stories I tell. There are probably some that I don’t know as there are certainly biases and implications that I haven’t seen or considered, but there are some that are more or less intentional. I always want to try to convey a sense of we’ve-been-here-before. Experience breeds calm and confidence and stories are a great way to gain experience without actually living it. To take a half step back, I am often trying to project a sense of confidence and inject a sense of confidence – doubt is fatal. The other piece is humor. A ton of my stories are little riffs or pranks or funny happenings. I’m not sure how necessary this is, but laughing at pretty much everything is so much a part of who I am it’d be hard to really separate it out. To take a big step back from thinking about ultimate, the world is such a mess and there is so much that is awful why would you make it worse by taking it seriously? Or more correctly, since you are obligated to take it seriously, why would you make it worse by being frowny-face all the time? The world we want is one where people laugh, so laugh sometimes. Stepping back in to ultimate, we are putting a ton of work, effort, emotion, sacrifice into a sport. A sport that involves running around after a piece of plastic. That’s absurd. Sport itself has no inherent value, it is the effort and sacrifice that we put in that give it worth. But given the underlying ridiculousness of sport in general and frisbee in particular, you’d better be laughing sometimes. I’ve drifted awfully far afield, but any time you dig down into the roots of a thing, you’ll be underground.

There is another way in which I use story which isn’t so obvious. One of the primary jobs of a coach is to get the entire team lined up and going in the same direction. Once you’ve done this, the rest of the work is really easy; in fact, it’s just details at that point. One of the tools (there are many) I use to make this happen is narrative. I am constantly trying to build a story for the team, for the season, that the team can fit into. This narrative should be comfortable (even including the idea that discomfort is comfortable) in that it should fit the team, both where the team is and where the team would like to go. This narrative necessarily changes with each team and necessarily changes within the season. To go all the way back to 2008, we had lost something like 6 or 8 games by 1, 2 or 3 points. We just couldn’t close. So I intentionally built a narrative that was “this is our demon, we must face it and know that to win these games will be doubly difficult because we have to beat the other team and our demon both.” This narrative accepts the present situation without judgement and provides a path forward. In the end we did win one of these games, beating Stanford 13-12 to go to Nationals. I don’t want to take too much credit, because most should go to Venus for willing us there, but a little goes to the story because it gave us a vision of what could be and more importantly how it could be.  If you reflect back over the teams and organizations you’ve been a part of, you will see that those with a strong self-narrative were eminently more rewarding to be a part of and more successful.

I thought I’d finish with a story about stories, but unfortunately, I can’t think of one.

-Lou Burruss