Cue

The oldest self-talk on record is about twenty-seven centuries old, and it happens in the dark.

In the twentieth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus lies awake in his own house. He is home after twenty years and he cannot say so. He is disguised as a beggar, on the floor, in a hall full of men who have spent years eating his food and courting his wife, and he is close to doing something rash.

The scenes between are imagined: the cold of the floor, the noise of other men comfortable in a room that belongs to him, the particular arithmetic of a man who has been patient for twenty years and has to lie still for one more night.

What is on the record is what he does about it. He strikes his own chest and speaks to his heart. Endure, he tells it. You have endured worse than this.

Read that again for what it is. The oldest hero in Western literature, on the worst night of the longest trip in the canon, does not steady himself with a prayer or a plan. He uses the second person on himself.

Nine centuries later a Roman emperor filled a private notebook with the same move.

The book we call the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius carries, in the manuscripts, a plainer title: To Himself. It was never meant for us. There is no reader in it, no audience, no argument being won in front of anyone.

It is a man with the hardest job in the world writing himself instructions, in the second person, about how to get up in the morning, how to meet fools without anger, how to do the task in front of him. It reads, in places, exactly like a coach talking a player through a bad stretch, because that is what it is. The player and the coach happen to share a body.

I start the season here because I want to fix its subject before anyone can dress it up.

This season is about talk. Not visualization, which last season weighed and found real but modest. Talk: the words a performer says to himself, silently or under his breath or written in ink on the underside of a cap brim, before and during the thing he is trying to do.

Athletes have done this for as long as there have been athletes, mostly without instruction. The note taped to the mirror. The word repeated on the walk to the line. The scolding, the bargaining, the sentence that steadies.

Every clubhouse in history has been full of it, and nearly all of it has gone unrecorded, because it happens in the one room no reporter enters.

Which is the first problem, and I will raise it before you do. A practice with no witness looks like a practice with no evidence. If the whole event happens inside one skull, what exactly is there to study?

More than you would think. Two questions hang over the practice, and they are the season's whole cargo.

The first: does what you say to yourself change what you do?

That sounds unanswerable, a private act with no witness, but it turns out people have been dragging it into laboratories for a hundred years, and the earliest attempts were stranger than anything an athlete ever did. One researcher was so sure the inner voice was a physical whisper that the test of his theory required a man to be paralyzed alive. That story is two episodes away.

The second question is smaller and stranger: do the words matter? Not the sentiment, the words. Whether you say I or you. Whether you instruct or cheer.

The research says yes, and the answer runs through an emperor's notebook, a child talking to no one, thirty-two studies on a scale, and one very famous athlete on live television referring to himself by name.

The voice is already in your head. This season is about what it is, and what it can be made to do.