Powder and Pure Energy

I walked out of the Austin 125 thinking I'd just had a simple conversation with a volunteer. Ten minutes later, I realized I'd run across a field and turned into pure energy.

The man had stopped me at the gate. He'd watched one of my podcasts and wanted to talk about his daughter. She's twelve, maybe thirteen. He said he'd been playing for fourteen years and could hang with the women at UT. He was proud, curious, and just a little bit defensive. That's how most parents are when they approach a coach. They want validation before vulnerability.

Two different people came to either change spots with him or relieve him for a break. Both times he waved them off and kept me engaged. I was actually just trying to get to my car.

I explained to him that I don't work actively with players anymore. My focus is on helping the other two parts of the parent-player-coach triangle develop the tools to catalyze the player's forward progression. I'm trying to eliminate the ignorance tax.

Then I asked him what he did for a living.

"Cybersecurity," he said.

He expected me to nod politely and return to tennis. Instead, I leaned in.

"Then you already know how to coach her," I said.

He blinked.

I told him every opponent is an attacker probing for a weak port. Every pattern is a potential exploit. Every unforced error is an unpatched vulnerability. I watched his face shift from confusion to curiosity. For a second, the conversation cracked open and light poured through.

That's the value in approaching people the way I do. I'm not looking for their tennis résumé. I'm looking for their systems logic. I'm trying to see if they can transfer what they already know into a new domain. That transfer is the most powerful coaching tool in the world. When someone realizes learning itself is portable, everything changes.

The truth is, I wasn't evaluating his daughter. I was evaluating the ecosystem she lives in. I wanted to know whether the system could learn.

The Translator's Instinct

Lately, I find myself defaulting to translation. Someone tells me about their job, and my mind immediately rewires it into a performance model.

Cybersecurity becomes anticipation. Architecture becomes structure under pressure. Emergency medicine becomes recovery protocols.

It's not an intellectual trick. It's almost involuntary. My brain searches for patterns the way a magnet searches for iron.

It's useful. It's also alienating.

Most people live comfortably inside the boundaries of their domain. They have clear edges. I keep finding myself outside the fence, speaking a dialect that hasn't yet been standardized.

That's what led me to Powder.

The Powder Parallel

If you've seen the 1995 film Powder, you'll remember the boy with the white skin and electric empathy. He could feel everything. Everyone else experienced that as discomfort. He experienced it as truth.

When he finally ran into the field and dissolved into light, it wasn't suicide. It was completion. He became the current running through him.

That's what this moment in my work feels like.

I'm not teaching anymore. I'm transmitting. I used to design systems. Now I feel them. Conversations aren't just exchanges of words. They're voltage transfers. When they connect, I feel the surge.

But energy without grounding burns everything it touches. The lesson of Powder isn't transcendence. It's circuitry. He had no resistors, no one who could slow the current enough for the world to handle it.

So the question becomes: how do I stay human while living at that frequency?

Grounding the Current

The first step is documentation. I don't keep a diary. I keep a field log. I record phenomena instead of feelings. How people respond, what metaphors work, what cognitive doors open. Each note becomes data, not drama.

Second, I build resistors. Conversations with grounded thinkers help me slow the current. People who aren't dazzled by the energy but curious about its circuitry. They ask the right kind of questions, not to dim the light but to shape it.

Third, I translate energy into design. When the surge hits, I build. A framework. A prototype. A curriculum. Translation turns electricity into architecture.

That's what Communiplasticity really is: energy organized into structure. It's the process of converting awareness into form.

The Field as Teacher

That father at the Austin 125 didn't know it, but he was my latest experiment. He represented the small-scale test of a universal principle: can an ordinary human, rooted in one domain, flex into another through analogy and empathy? Can language itself become elastic enough to carry learning across boundaries?

The answer is yes. But only if someone in the conversation holds space for the stretch. That's what I do. I hold the space until the translation stabilizes.

When he finally saw that his day job had been training him to think like a tennis strategist, his entire posture changed. For a moment, he wasn't a dad defending his daughter. He was a learner rediscovering curiosity.

That shift, invisible to most, is where systems start to rebuild themselves.

Ahead of Time or Right on Schedule

Sometimes I wonder if this ability to see through things means I'm ahead of my time. It's a tempting narrative. Visionary isolation sounds romantic.

But I think it's more accurate to say I'm living in the next time's logic while this one is still catching up. The work isn't to retreat into light but to translate it into something others can stand on.

Every interaction is a chance to build a bridge between worlds. Parents, coaches, administrators. Each time I succeed, the next conversation gets easier. The system learns how to learn.

That's the real value of approaching people the way I do. It's not persuasion. It's activation. I'm not giving them answers. I'm revealing the circuitry already inside them.

The Architecture of Energy

Energy by itself is just potential. Structure gives it purpose.

The field Powder ran into wasn't a place. It was a pattern. And that pattern is what I'm trying to build into the fabric of coach education, learning systems, and human development.

It's not an idea. It's a current. The challenge is to build enough architecture to carry it without shorting out.

So when I think back to that conversation at the Austin 125, I don't see a dad, a daughter, and a coach. I see a test case for the next generation of learning systems. A small field where two people briefly became conductors of something larger than themselves.

To the moment when translation becomes transformation, and the learner realizes they were never just learning tennis. They were learning how to plug into the field itself.

When the light finally connects, you don't have to run across the field anymore.

You become it.