UpClose & Personal - Steve Capellini

Who do you think wins in life? Who are the winners, and who are the losers?

I remember once walking down a street in Mexico and seeing a woman apparently living on the sidewalk, breastfeeding her baby in front of the passersby, with a look on her face that made me think she didn’t have very much to look forward to in this world.

I’ve passed a lot of other people who’ve stirred up in me the same cocktail of emotions that this woman did, feelings of gratitude for my own lifestyle mixed with compassion for others’ misfortunes, with a bitter twist of superiority topping it all off.

I’ve also passed other people on the sidewalk, movie stars for example, gorgeous fashion models, younger, handsomer, stronger men. And I’ve whipped up a completely different cocktail for myself in those circumstances, one consisting of self-doubt, awkwardness, and a general sense of deficiency—all poured over the ice-cold rocks of jealousy.

For me, at least, life is about going in and out of alternating states constantly. Some days I’m a winner. Others I’m a loser. In the flash of a moment, as long as it takes to walk a few feet down a sidewalk, I can change.

And over time I’ve come to see that the real me exists somewhere outside these polarized points of view, outside any point of view at all. I am an experiencer of states. I am an awareness of a being that feels alternately like it’s winning and losing.

So who wins? Me? The movie star? The poor Mexican woman? At any moment, I remind myself, any of the three of us could get run over by a truck. Then who would the winner be?

Once, I felt like a winner because I landed a job that another man was trying to get. I judged him because he seemed like an uneducated redneck to me, but then a week later I had an accident on this new job, almost severing my hand, and as I was rushed to the hospital in somebody’s truck, we passed by this “loser” walking down the street. I watched him go by out the window, and I learned something about life.

I am glad I still have my hand, and I have used my hands over the years since that time to do the one thing that makes any sense to me in light of the apparent fact that we are all of us winners and losers—that is, I attempt, however feebly, to connect with others one at a time through touch until the winner and loser duality is erased. This, for me, is what massage can do.

One person at a time, it chips away judgment, the same judgment that causes pain and suffering. This attempt at non-judgmental interaction might be thought of as naïve by some, and even by me in my more cynical moments, but I know that originally my heart was pure when I got into the massage business, and an essential part of it still is, even though some of the sad sights I’ve seen in the intervening years have dimmed the hope in my eyes at times.

I believe that you can enter a special place when you give a massage, a place that is holy because it is outside of the duality we create in our lives so much of the time. As long as you can go there, you are doing good work, regardless of the label or the technique or the modality.

And how do you know when you’ve arrived at this sacred space? You know when, at the end of a session, you can ask yourself who the winner is, the person on the table, or you, and then you can answer yourself, in all honesty, that you just plain don’t know.

Guess who wins then?

That’s right.

Everybody.

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