Episodes:
Part 1: Time, Space, and Tennis ← You Are Here
Part 2: Winston
Part 3: The Dharma Racquets
Part 4: Error As Hidden Intention
Part 5: Improvisation, Trust Is
Zero-zero. Love-love. Lazy sunshine, soft breeze, nothing beyond this moment.
:^D
Two settings stretch time for me: playing music and playing tennis. In a continuum of crescendos and rests, each space buffers my senses with silence, rewarding me with greater and greater focus and unity of body and mind. When things distill to a glorious present as I play – there is only my next note or my next shot. I am in motion and also still. I don’t flow, tho. I am flow.
Silence is not a prerequisite for stillness, but it can be a superhighway. Even in the center of kinetic fury, one can find stillness in the noise. Find your stillness; find your world.
There are places where you and others share a wavelength that never lets you down. In those continuums, nothing else – no one else – matters. Everything except the present – the now – is irrelevant. Achieving a state of exquisite flow is one thing – being able to share in it, as I can on stage or on a tennis court, is where I find humanity. And whole lot of fun.
Stillness, however, is in constant conflict with “the now.” The present is the most restless tense. To be human is to anticipate the future, often at the expense of enjoying the present.
As of yet, we can’t listen to the past or the future. We only hear the now. And for sure, you can’t touch the past, any more than you can taste the future. All your senses only exist in the now.
You can, of course, recall sensations – often to a point of transport. But memories are only shadows; the past a lucid dream at best. Rabbit holes always dead end.
The future, on the other hand, is pure chaos. Unlike the past, though, it’s to some extent controllable through the decisions you make in the moment. Still, if it was easy to predict the future, we’d all live there.
The present, at any given time, is all you know for certain.
In a way, every choice you make in life is a means to create fate. The more you can predict, the better you will react to the entropy of the universe. The slightest overlay of order on the cosmic randomness we ping-pong around in can tame, or at least slow its inherent chaos.
There is a sort of optimum middle where order and randomness go together. That is what a master is looking for in a work of art: the optimal combination of order and randomness.
-Alan Watts
Tennis, for me, brings all this home. On court, my body and mind are forced to deal with and solve problems, together, in space and time. The game narrows my awareness to the ball in space, movements, sounds, light… all that surrounds me in the immediate moment. Playing tennis suspends me in the present, where for me "living in the now" is a subset of fun.
At the same time, “living in the now” is fraught with challenge to quiet the world inside you. Looking inward risks the construction of a mental anechoic chamber. Sometimes for me, dropping out life’s noise silences the world outside, but not loud thoughts within.
The paradox of stillness is that, since it would take all the energy in the universe to stop the universe, true silence is unattainable, merely approachable. What we discern as silence is in effect only an event horizon to pure nothingness. We can “be quiet” or “be still,” but we’ll never “be silence” or “be stillness.”
The best we can do is get unstuck in time, as Kurt Vonnegut advised. Freed from temporality, your mind can’t tell the distance between any here or there. Everywhere you are is now!
From the first time I picked up a tennis racquet at 5 years-old, I sensed the game pointed to a larger universe, and I knew I felt safe on a tennis court. Over the next dozen or so years, as I played in leagues and high school teams and camp tournaments, the game revealed life’s primary challenge to find stillness and peace of mind. In order for your movement in space to be at a maximum, for you to perform your best, in the context of tennis, there can be nothing but the thought of the shot you are taking. Nothing, that is, but to be in “the now.”
For me, in tennis and beyond, movement has never been the issue. Stillness is my white whale. For how fast and frenetic tennis appears from without, the game within demands absolute focus. And it’s not enough to perform your best once or twice. You have to be perfect at least more than half the time. And even then, one or two points lost at critical moments can derail everything.
In the end, every time I walk on the court, I know if I can solve the puzzle of my game, I can solve parts of the puzzle of my life (or at least find a few edge pieces).
No pressure, man.
Originally published at westyreflector.net on 16 May 2023.