As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
The scrum and the tackle are the two really contentious areas of the game. If you get those two aspects right, most rugby matches will work in your favour.
I try to be really balanced. I walk a lot, I wear a Fitbit, and that has really been a game changer for me. I get my steps, I eat whatever I want, I go to France and put on my bread-and-butter suit. Then I'll be balanced, like I'm going to eat my salads for a few days. But I just try to be really balanced with my body. And that has been a good pact for me so far.
I make plenty of mistakes and I'll make plenty more mistakes, too. That's part of the game. You've just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.
The thing you realize as you get older and you play, that you don't really understand when you're a backup the first few offseasons, how important that mental rest is. It's a grind physically during the season, dealing with the hits and the physical pain that goes with playing in this game. But mentally it's probably more taxing, so you need that ability to find that escape.