“Geometry at school did not get my attention. Maybe if I’d had a different teacher it would have been different—somebody that just said, ‘Ewa, think of it this way,’ or, ‘Look at it this way and you will get it.’ Or they could have taken our whole class to a poolroom and said, ‘Check this out!’ But it was so boring at school. I couldn’t even keep my eyes open in class, you know? But now, when I give lessons to someone, I try to figure out as quickly as I can if they have hand‐eye coordination and also, are they just interested in the game or are they interested in the geometry and the physics of it. Are they math‐oriented.”
Ewa has been playing billiards professionally for nearly thirty years. Yet she still gets the same charge that the sport has always given her. “Even when I do an exhibition, after all these years, I get nervous. People say, ‘Well you’ve done it so many times.’ But it doesn’t matter; it’s about being in that moment.”
Playing billiards puts Ewa Laurance in the zone. And being in the zone puts Ewa Laurance face to face with the Element.
The Zone
To be in the zone is to be in the deep heart of the Element. Doing what we love can involve all sorts of activities that are essential to the Element but are not the essence of it—things like studying, organizing, arranging, limbering up, etc. And even when we’re doing the thing we love, there can be frustrations, disappointments, and times when it simply doesn’t work or come together. But when it does, it transforms our experience of the Element. We become focused and intent. We live in the moment. We become lost in the experience and perform at our peak. Our breathing changes, our minds merge with our bodies, and we feel ourselves drawn effortlessly into to the heart of the Element.
Aaron Sorkin is the writer of two Broadway plays, A Few Good Men and The Farnsworth Invention; three television series, Sports Night, The West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip;and five feature films, A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, and the soon‐to‐be‐released Trial of the Chicago 7. He’s been nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards, eight Golden Globes, and the Academy Award for Best Picture.
“I never set out to be a writer,” he told me. “I always saw myself as an actor. I got an acting degree at college. I was so passionate about this that when I was in high school, I’d take the train into New York City when I was broke and wait until the second half of a play when there would be empty seats to sneak into after the intermission. Writing for fun was not something I was ever introduced to. It always seemed like a chore. I had written one sketch for a college party and my teacher, Gerard Moses, had said to me, ‘You could do this for a living, you know, if you wanted.’ But I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Do what? I thought, and moved on.
“A few months after I left school, a friend of mine was going out of town. He had his grandfather’s antique typewriter and asked me to hang onto it for him. At this time I was paying a friend of mine fifty dollars a week to sleep on his floor in a tiny apartment on the Upper East Side of New York. I’d got a job with a children’s theater company for a while and some work on a soap. This was in 1984 and I was doing the rounds of auditions.
“This particular weekend all of my friends were out of town. It was one of those Friday nights in New York where you feel like everyone but you has been invited to a party. I was broke, the TV wasn’t working, and all there was to do was muck around with this piece of paper and the typewriter. I sat down at it and wrote from nine o’clock at night until noon the next day. I fell in love with it all.
“I realized that all those years of acting classes and taking the train to the theater was not about acting but about what the play actually was. I’d been a cocky actor—I wasn’t ever a wallflower— but writing had been so far removed from my consciousness until that night.
“The first play I wrote was a one‐act play called Hidden in This Picture, and that was well received and reviewed. Then my sister, who is a lawyer, told me about a case in Guantánamo Bay involving some marines accused of killing a fellow marine. The story intrigued me and I spent the next year and a half writing the stage play for A Few Good Men.
“When it was playing on Broadway, I remembered that conversation with Gerard. I rang him up. ‘Is this what you meant?’ I asked him.”
I asked Aaron how feels when he’s writing. “When it’s going well,” he said, “I feel completely lost in the process. When it’s going poorly, I’m desperately looking for the zone. I have flashlights on and I’m desperately looking for it. I wouldn’t speak for other writers, but I’m basically an on‐and‐off switch. When I feel that something I’m writing is going well, everything in my life is good and the things in my life that aren’t good are completely manageable. If it’s not going well, Miss America could be standing there in a swimsuit handing me a Nobel Prize and I wouldn’t be happy about it.”
Doing the thing you love to do is no guarantee that you’ll be in the zone every time. Sometimes the mood isn’t right, the time is wrong, and the ideas just don’t flow. Some people develop their own personal rituals and for getting to the zone. They don’t always work. I asked Aaron if he had techniques of his own. He said he doesn’t and he wished that he had. But he does know when to stop pushing.
“When it’s not going well, I put it away and try again tomorrow or the next day. One thing I do is drive around in my car with music on. I try to find someplace where I don’t have to think about driving too much, like a freeway, where you don’t have to stop at red lights or turn or anything.
“What I don’t do is watch other people’s movies or television shows or read their plays for fear that they’re going to be very good and either make me feel worse or simply make me inclined to imitate what they’re doing.”
At its best, the process of writing for Aaron is completely absorbing. “Writing for me is a very physical activity. I’m playing all the parts, I’m getting up and down from my desk, I’m walking around. When it’s going well, in fact, I’ll find that I’ve been doing laps around my house, way out in front of where I type. In other words, I’ve been writing without writing. Then I have to go back to where I am on the page and make sure I actually type what I just did.”
In all likelihood, you’ve had instances in your life where you’ve become “lost” in an experience the way Aaron Sorkin did when he finally connected with writing. You begin to do something you love, and the rest of the world slips away. Hours pass, and it feels like minutes. During this time, you have been “in the zone.” Those who have embraced the Element find themselves in this place regularly. This is not to suggest that they find every experience of doing the thing they love blissful, but they regularly have optimal experiences while doing these things, and they know they will again.