Phil Jackson: Immersion

Phil Jackson had this to say on Wednesday, when asked whether playing NBA basketball is fun:

"I think joy is in the competition, and if you are a player that relishes competition, I think this is what you consider to be fun, even though it may not be ha ha fun, it’s engagement. It’s immersion. It’s focus. All those things that draw the best out of your attention and your capabilities energy wise."

This idea of “immersion” really grabs me. We’ve probably all experienced this at some point: we lose ourselves in the task at hand; time evaporates; the world pleasantly falls away. And we’ve also, in the past twenty years of watching Phil Jackson-coached teams, gotten pretty used to seeing this phenomenon at play on the basketball court. We know what it looks like. The ball flows freely. The players’ faces take on a cool intensity. Their movements become both calmer and more dynamic and the game suddenly looks easy. As far as I’m concerned, these things–engagement, immersion, focus, joy–come pretty close to defining the best sense of both “work” and “play,” which, as anybody whose ever seriously practiced art or sports or music can tell you, aren’t all that far apart.

I’m reticent a little bit to use this analysis, but you talk to guys that come back from the war and they miss being in the war, and they go back and reenlist because they miss that total immersion of life that they have at that particular time. That’s some of what an athlete gets, that adrenaline, that immersion of total use of their facilities and all their faculties that make it hard to leave the game.