The great thing about being young is that you’re open to the kind of mind-forging repetition that can etch all sorts of information onto an unconscious level. Where skill X, often onerous, can become “as easy as breathing.”
Often called “muscle-memory,” it’s the kind of mental elasticity that leads to junior tennis champions involuntarily practicing serve after serve in their sleep, leaping horizontally off their beds like in “The Exorcist” or something and waking up the neighborhood dogs.
For other examples, see: 6-year-old piano protégés, those Olympic gymnasts who are provisionally 16 but inevitably look like they’re around 12 and that Carlsen chess wunderkind who can officially wipe the floor with anyone on earth who has the sheer gumption to sit down across from him.
I mean, these are exceptions among exceptions, obviously. Very few have the metric tons of unprocessed talent, let alone the training and opportunity to flourish in their field from a sufficiently early age.
But all of us young college folk have a range of potential (in writing, running, whatever) which, through repetition shaped by will, can gift us talents beyond our conception.
This is why it’s satisfying to see the opening crunch of a football team’s offensive line. Every individual player has spent so many hundreds of hours, usually from a young age, hitting both dummies and players in one particular way. You’re seeing hundreds of hours condensed into a few seconds of footwork and fury.
Watching this spectacle allows a keyhole view into the shaped unconscious reaction: the externalization of the darkened electrical fields that form the landscape of the human mind.
It’s also incomparably dangerous. How many kids are irreparably screwed up by parents who want to live through their child? The kind of failed-sports-dreams father who would, without a second thought, accept a perverse and permanent “Freaky Friday” switch with their offspring.
Since they haven’t found any magic lamp or monkey’s paw to make that switch (and God knows they’ve tried), they’re going to do the next best thing: shape their kid’s soft brain into what they think their aspirations once were.
They might even delude themselves into thinking they’re good parents. If the poor kid shows some small potential in an area, they pounce on it and inflate it, paying for tennis or chess lessons in the name of “fulfilling potential.”
Not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing. If the kid likes one of those things and then goes on to take it up in college, fine. Besides mental conditioning, teamwork and friendship can also come from some of these activities, no matter how poster-slogan and insincere it sounds.
The dream parents get their dream child. They get to live, somehow, through the joy of their progeny.
But even in this fortunate situation, where both parents and kid enjoy the unconscious training, a serious problem remains.
Say a baseball game has ended, and the whole family is driving back from a game. Their team lost — badly. The car fills with the silence that comes with defeat.
Suddenly the red-jerseyed 14-year-old thinks, “Am I doing this for my reasons? Do I enjoy it, or do I enjoy the fact that my parents enjoy it?”
He has spent hours on hours perfecting his technique, committing everything down to memory, and yet the center that holds all of it together, the desire to play, begins to shiver and come loose like a poster half-heartedly glued to a dorm wall.
Perhaps all parents are unconsciously guilty of this tendency to see themselves in their children right down to the dreams. To see their growth as a sort of replay or echo of their own childhood. To find themselves saying phrases they hated as kids: “Because I said so,” or “It won’t kill you.”
I’m looking back on this and realizing that at least half of this article is a huge ballooning tangent. I wanted to write about how even simple actions, like kicking a football in a singular way or playing Tetris again and again, can offer something like a religious experience. To brand something so deep into your unconscious it can never be taken away from you is to give yourself an irrevocable gift.
But, more important than anything else, these gifts have to be of your own choosing.