Chickens, Eggs, and Intuition

How long do you want to spend on this decision? A tenth of a second? Half a second? 5 seconds? 10? A minute? 2?

How long do we have to answer this question?

Oops, 5 seconds have already passed.

How much time is left in the round again? How long is this game going? How sure are you of that? What's your record again? What do you need to make top 8? Which of these questions are relevant? Which creatures on the board are relevant?

Oops, this was about sequencing our land drop. We probably should be spending a little less time on it. That was a mistake. It's important to remember your mistakes and learn from them. But it's also important to make a decision. It's been 10 seconds.

Play your land.

We'll have time to think about whether it was sequenced exactly right later.

The best athletes have nearly total control over their bodies. They can make them do extremely difficult things at extremely precise times.

Peak athletic performance involves pushing all the resources of the body towards a very narrow goal. Athletes know how to do this without consciously directing it. In fact, consciously trying to direct their movements gets in the way - it's too slow, the control is too coarsely grained. The best intuition is built deep into the subconscious through years of slow, conscious practice.

This is why one of the classic mind tricks golfers will often pull is asking their opponent "Your swing is so good, how do you swing like that?"

It gets the opponent "in their head" (a bad thing).

The best Magic players have built similar tools for controlling not their bodies, but their consciousness. They are able to direct their focus and analysis intuitively towards whichever decisions, problems, and information feel the most important.

This is a game for people who want to be very good at operating their own mind. Like me.

But trying to live in your mind can be a dangerous thing.

Just taking a few even inhales.

Using your breath to make deep contact with yourself.

Now come and find the contact of your feet on the floor.

And feel that you are *inside** your feet.*

It's like you're pouring yourself, your awareness, into your feet.

It might help to have just a sense of curiosity

About what it's like to inhabit the backs of your heels,

all the way along the arch, to the balls of your feet, and to the toes.

and let your breath adjust to being that far down in your body.

letting go of anything you need to,

so your inhale doesn't take you up away from there.

Your mental and your emotional life can settle

in this foundation in your feet.

Being bored is one of the most intolerable feelings for me. My closest friends and I have always joked that I like to always have one or two "life problems" that I'm working on. Regardless of if things are going well or not, I always need to find something new that I can work on.

It's not exactly that I think I'd be lazy if I stopped working on my life as a problem to solve - it's that I'd be bored. Progress is fun. Solving problems is fun.

My problem solving brain? She's fucking hungry.

What happens when the problem becomes getting her to stop?

How do you break out of your own thoughts? It's not as simple as just directing your brain to stop thinking. That's a thought. How do we stop it?? Another thought.

Mindfulness meditation practices say that we should learn to sit with our thoughts as an observer, not a participator. That we can sink back into our bodies and our breath and let the clouds of thoughts keep passing by. They won't stop coming, but we don't have to follow them. We can just watch.

This, especially paired with practices that ask me to do a similar "sitting with" the sensations in my body, is one of the first tactics I've found after years of searching that significantly helps with my chronic pain. Which is terrifying.

But that doesn't make much sense, does it?

My pain is the biggest problem I've faced in my entire life. It's an experience I can only describe as torture. At various points I've plainly described to people close to me how I would without hesitation trade one of my legs for the pain to completely go away.

I've spent thousands of dollars, weeks and months of hospital visits, physical therapy, acupuncture, talk therapy, and 50+% of my mental energy for the past five years trying to solve my pain.

So why the fuck is it so scary and frustrating that mindfulness has worked? And why isn't the pain gone? Why is it still here?

Over this weekend, I spent most of my Saturday and Sunday watching coverage of Spotlight Series Denver. Tarkir Dragonstorm is shaping up to be one of my all-time favorite limited formats. I've been having so much fun figuring out how to win, I've almost forgotten to be frustrated that I'm losing a bit more than I normally do.

It feels like a beautiful puzzle that I'm in the middle of cracking. Every draft, I gather new information. Every discord message with friends whose opinions on the game I respect gives me different ideas for how I might be making systematic mistakes that correcting will tangibly help me win more. All I want to do is hop in another draft and continue solving the problem.

In fact, my brain wants to do this so much that while I'm in a draft, when I've already decided what my pick is going to be for the pack, I find myself reflexively checking Discord, checking Bluesky, checking 17lands, watching Denver coverage just for more scraps of information. Not a second of boredom can permeate. More dopamine hits making me feel like I'm solving the problem.

My brain would love nothing more than to keep feeding itself all this information for two days straight. Sometimes I wish there were a way to play games of magic in my head, without having to mediate them through my body.

Instead when I play Magic, I find myself hunched over a computer, the pain channel in the back of my neck complaining, my hands getting sore like they are right now typing these words out.

My problem-solving brain churning about how to formulate each sentence, how to sequence my lands.

At the end of a three hour drafting session while watching top 8 coverage, I realized that it was time for bed and that I still needed to do my mindfulness/embodiment exercise for the day.

More accurately - I finally admitted to myself that I was in too much pain and I needed to return to my body -- my boring, torturous, not-fun-to-be-in body.

And so I stood, looking like an idiot in the center of my room for 15 minutes, listening to a recording of someone I pay to guide me back towards living in my own body again.

It's like you're pouring yourself, your awareness, into your feet.

And my thoughts kept flitting away.

Should I take a break from drafting before the SystemMagic-JointExploration team draft tomorrow to give my brain a rest? What do I need to pack for my friend's wedding? Will I be able to get to sleep early enough after this? My legs hurt from how much I'm needing to shift my weight to stay balanced. Is that normal? Wait, I'm trying to live in my feet right now. I can feel them. That's all I have to do. Just feel them.

It's easy to get frustrated with myself for how much I struggle with this. Who's bad at just existing in their body? Shouldn't I be grateful for how simple the answer is? How hard can it be to just relax a little, stop thinking so much, stop viewing everything as a problem waiting to be solved, and solve the biggest problem I've ever faced?

It turns out it's extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely hard to shift deep, subconscious patterns about how you experience your own mind and body. Rad.

Chronic pain exists in the liminal space between mental and physical illness. It's impossible to disentangle the two if the goal is understanding the mechanisms behind pain -- pain states, like any state, are both physical and mental. They're an interaction between your mind's (sub-conscious) interpretation of your body's internal state, and that interpretation is automatically and immediately played out by physical mechanisms within the body. Muscles tense to protect areas that are perceived to be in danger. Chemical signals are sent and received before conscious thoughts can even form. And the cascading feedback from all of these systems gets reincorporated back into the mind's perception of pain.

Chickens and eggs, stuck in a loop. How do you teach your mind to not perceive a danger that is very real, one that it's in the continuous process of both creating and reacting to?

jUsT TeLL It tO sToP

Lol. While you're at it, try asking it to stop perceiving the color blue, or tell your ears to stop reacting to loud noises.

Everybody knows how to get good at Magic.

All you need to do is put your maximum effort into identifying flaws in your game and practicing better habits. Draft the hard way, staying flexible but committing when appropriate. Play the deck you know is the best choice for every constructed tournament. Make your testing slow, thoughtful, and focused on answering specific questions instead of just jamming games. Always take the time to think carefully about sideboarding in limited. Don't rely too much on autopilot, and don't worry about whether you're likely to win or lose. Never care about your record in a tournament, treat every match as if you're playing round 1 of FNM. Don't get discouraged by the losses, and don't get too excited about the wins. Keep your head down and learn, learn, learn.

Focus on what you can control. Focus on what matters.

But the point is that these things are hard. The challenge isn't knowing what to do, but figuring out how to ingrain it deeply. To push and pull against the tidal forces of how your brain already works and re-shape your own consciousness so that the things that make someone good at Magic start to come naturally. If you're forcing it, you're doing it wrong. You need to become a different person. If you don't want to? Then I guess you'll never be good enough.

This is why the idea that to solve my chronic pain, I'm going to need to stop pushing my problem-solving brain so hard and start to live in my body more is scary.

I've always been someone who enjoys living in my own mind. I like it here, and not in a way that is just driven by the classic trope of an intellectual retreating from the world.

It feels like my mind brings me closer to the world!

One of the most common adjectives my friends use to describe me is thoughtful. It's true in the colloquial, complementary sense, but it's also true in the more literal sense: I am extremely full of thoughts. Thoughts about my life, my world, and the lives and worlds of people around me. I've always liked this about myself.

At some point in 2020, something happened to my mind and my body. I don't know for sure if it was the blaring pain from a tooth infection that persisted through a filling, a root canal, and an extraction, the social isolation and stress of COVID lockdown, an asymptomatic COVID infection, hurting something in my spine from lifting a bunch of furniture while we were moving.

Or maybe it was just a lifetime of learning to ignore my body's signals of discomfort to gain more focus, more processing power, more ability to solve problems.

All I know is that one day, the pain in my hands just started. And no one could help me. And it kept getting worse as my mind kept searching, panicking, for solutions.

Chickens and eggs.

It doesn't feel fair that the "solution" to this problem may be to habituate myself into doing less thinking. That whichever came first, mind or body, my pain is now placing a limit on my abilities to think, to process, to engage with the world. A disability, if you will.

It might just be that the pain never goes away - that I can solve it only temporarily, by pulling back from the world, by resting my thinking mind and returning to my body. That it will always return when I next push myself too hard, get too excited about some problem, get too engaged with the world. That something has fundamentally shifted in my nervous system and I'm forced to become a smaller, less interesting, less interested person, if I want life to be livable.

This is what scares me.

Alternatively, it's possible that rewiring your entire nervous system is really, really hard and takes a lot of time and effort. It probably requires learning to let go of some things, sure, but just because you have to give up the use of your hands and legs while you're climbing out of a hole, doesn't mean you're losing them forever.

I distinctly remember an argument I had with a Magic friend all the way back at an original Theros sealed PTQ about splashing Elspeth, Sun's Champion in their Green-Black sealed deck. I was brought up under the common limited wisdom that you simply don't splash double-pipped cards. My friend explained that even though it looked wrong, they actually were able to cobble together 6 sources for the card by playing some clunky fixers, and it was a powerful enough bomb that it didn't matter if they had to wait to cast it as long as the game went long, which their deck was good at doing.

Internally, I dismissed them as rationalizing their poor decision and playing a bunch of bad cards just to enable one good card inconsistently. They top 8ed that PTQ, and again, I dismissed it because I assumed their greed had happened to pay off and they got lucky enough to draw their sources and their bomb in most of the games.

I was fairly confident that I was a better limited player than them. I was very good at building consistent, powerful decks that curved out and affected the board, and figuring out how to fit the most powerful cards I could given the constraints of my pool's mana and color depth.

In fact, I thought I was one of the best limited players in the world for a long, long time.

I was good, don't get me wrong. I consistently did well in team sealed tournaments, one of the most skill-testing formats that exists. I eventually made good money playing Arena Opens. I helped Mora prepare for the MOCS in vintage cube and they went 4-2 against some of the strongest players in the world.

I also never top 8ed any of the online PTQs I played in, and I couldn't get meaningfully above 60% winrate on Arena ladder despite many other prominent players demonstrably doing better than that at a consistent rate.

I've gotten a lot better at Magic in the past year, and I no longer think I am, or ever was, one of the best limited players in the world. I think I had developed a particular set of high-level skills that allowed me to win at a consistent rate, but there were oceans of space for growth that I had closed off because of my narrow view of what was "correct".

The truth is, I often feel like I'm behind in limited now, maybe because I've finally admitted to myself that there's a lot more to learn. Part of this is having focused more heavily on constructed recently but part of it is realizing that I have a significant weakness in gameplay that holds me back even when I draft fundamentally strong decks. And even though I think my limited deckbuilding is up there with the best, after watching players like Nicole Tipple win our house drafts over and over with manabases that make me cringe, and watching Jason and cft find success with synergy spaces and archetypes that sometimes have virtually zero correlation with 17lands data, I can now see vast mountains of skill in the distance that I've yet to climb.

The more I've learned about chronic pain and about connecting to my own body, the more I've learned how deeply right and wrong I was at the same time.

I used to think concepts like "biopsychosocial" and "psychosomatic" meant that the pain was "all in my mind", and that idea felt so absurdly disconnected from the reality I was experiencing that it couldn't be the full story.

Now I know that, while "all in my mind" definitely isn't the full story, not even close, neither is it exactly wrong, either. These concepts are trying to emphasize how the mind and the body aren't separable as causes - that our bodies are often "doing the thinking" just as much as our brains, and their 'thoughts' can be as difficult to untangle as any other.

I used to think the best magic players had superhuman intellects, and could rapidly solve problem after problem through intense calculation.

Now I understand that the game is far too complicated for anyone to process everything consciously. The best players are indeed capable of processing vast amounts of data rapidly, but instead of using a superhuman brain that can be used to spit out the solution to any problem, they are training powerful, but subconscious and narrow intuitions through hours on hours of careful conscious practice, so that when the tournament comes, they can leave all but the necessary calculations (and there are plenty of these) to a well-trained "autopilot".

No one can do difficult things through sheer force of will. Trying to push everything into conscious processing will fail.

And intuitions, whether they're mental or physical, aren't magic. They're just slowly earned. You can't skip steps.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I think this concept can be broadly applied to any "sufficiently advanced" structure of knowledge, not just technology and science. I know that for a lot of people, my level of skill at Magic can, from a distance... well... look like magic.

I think I'm pretty good at explaining my thought processes. This is a result of me being a very mental person. I've always already dissected my own thoughts, so It's usually easier for me than most to share them! But there will always be some inescapable layer of mysticism when it comes to describing how I succeed at the game. I can't let you into my mind, any more than I can escape it (my writing, I guess, attempts to do both).

It feels similarly mystical to me when people describe how they live in their bodies and are able to escape their minds. I never enjoyed doing that as much as I enjoyed living in the vivid and interesting world of my thoughts. I wanted to do it even less when my body became primarily a place of suffering.

So I never developed the skill.

But now I'm in a deep, deep hole, and there's only one way out.

Time to do my exercises, and stop thinking so goddamn hard about how to solve this problem.

See you on the other side.