This week begins with Super Bowl Sunday....In addition to the fierce competitive spirit of whichever team you are rooting for (2026 brings East Coast New England Patriots v.s. West Coast Seattle Sea Hawks--battling in California, no less!), the 2026 culture war has brought a new split to the highlight of Super Bowl musical spectacle at half-time. Puerto Rican American singer Bad Bunny, the official headliner of this year's NFL entertainment extravaganza, will sing in Spanish. In competitive protest, Turning Point USA, (led by Erika Kirk) will offer their alternative "All American Halftime Show", featuring Kid Rock, on another channel. Who could have ever dreamed of such an entanglement around Super Bowl music! The cultural/political power struggles are unlikely to be solved by a battle of the bands, even as Super Bowl 2026 fades. In contrast this week, I invite you to consider the power of the soft.
Soft seems so contradictory to a week that begins with the toughness of premier football players, and a climate of social-political pressures underlying, not just athletics, but healthcare, immigration, international power plays, and financial maneuvers. If you feel your body and mind is in a constant state of tension, consider softening. By definition, the soft has the quality of yielding to pressure or weight. Soft fruit yields to our touch. Soft is malleable; it can adjust and adapt. In nature, softness is a response to the awe of life in so many forms, and especially in our encounters with the vulnerable. In relationship and connection, softness is an expression of love; it is linked to tenderness and our own willing vulnerability. In our inner spiritual depths, softness is our receptivity to the Divine, to the Inner Directive. Softness is the pull to love and to be Loved.
It may seem impossible to shift from bracing against what often feels like ominous threats of explosive change, to an experiment in cultivating softness. Yet, softness fosters resilience. I am not writing of weakness. Softness is not weakness; it is a kind of trust in the essential goodness at the root of life. That trust is strength, and self care. As the ancient Taoist sage Lao Tzu, put it: “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” Tao Te Ching, Verse 78
To thrive and survive as the world becomes increasingly complex, humans developed mechanisms and constructs that allow us to release emotional tension and conflict in ways that promote social order, rather than destroy it. Consider Super Bowl Sunday as collective sublimation. In psychology, sublimation is a defense mechanism that channels the socially unacceptable impulses into something more beneficial to collective society. With football, we channel our anger and frustration onto a reduced battlefield, a fight by proxy, with well trained athletes and lots of energy flowing, as we watch the players run, throw, catch, evade, tackle and fling themselves across the end zone. We spectators have our catharsis; we cheer, scream, even cry. Let them fight it out, we watch. Softness maybe useful in an occasional surprise play on the football field, but there is something to football as planned aggression. We can watch and shout and scream, in the stands or in our living room and leave the field when it's done. We don't have to be hardened after the game. Exhausted maybe, but it's cathartic exhaustion.
After the win or loss, return to softness of heart. This week may bring more challenges to softness. The wonder of the human heart is that it does reset, when we say yes to a softer way. (Susan Nettleton). https://hillsidesource.com/daily-thoughts/2018/6/26/yielding?rq=Lao%20Tzu https://grateful.org/resource/kindness/ https://www.best-poems.net/amanda-gorman/chorus-of-the-captains.html https://grateful.org/resource/belonging/