Zennis
Mindfulness and the Spin of the Ball
The first skill needed for the inner game is called ‘letting it happen’. W. Timothy Gallwey, “Tennis: Playing the Game.”
In my cozy, book-lined blog workshop, I have been trying to write a post on meditation and its first cousin, mindfulness. Because I am a neophyte practitioner of these time-honored arts, I decided to start with a subject that I know more about: tennis. What has that time-honored sport got to do with mindfulness, you may ask? Please read on.
One of the “goals” (probably the wrong word) of mindfulness and meditation is achieving a focused, “present” mind. While it sounds a little woo-woo, NOW really is all there is. Yesterday and tomorrow only exist in a gooey gray server in the three-pound universe between our ears.
It has been on a tennis court, not in an ashram, that I have visited the bliss of the moment, temporarily relieved of past regrets and the fear of the future. As a junior tennis player in Northern California, and then on Princeton’s men’s varsity team, I sometimes played matches during which I drifted into a state of tranquility, undisturbed by thoughts of how the match might turn out. Tennis players describe this state as “being in the zone,” or “playing out of one’s head.” (You rowers out there might call it “swing.”)
I never really thought about this phenomenon until I read “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey. Gallwey describes what I sometimes experienced on the court. While I oversimplify his thesis for brevity’s sake, Gallwey posits two opposing “selves” that sometimes don’t play very nicely in the cranial sandbox.
Self-One (“One”) is the insecure, competitive ego; an unstable mixture of venture capitalist and helicopter parent. One only cares about winning the match. Self-Two (“Two”) is the humble, highly-trained body; a system of motor mechanisms that has been trained, without any input from One, to play beautiful, flowing tennis. Think of Roger Federer.
However, when One turns his neurotic attention to the outcome of the match, all bets are off. The validity of Gallwey’s metaphor is illustrated by the following hypothetical, based on some of the nerve-wracking intra-squad matches that I played on my college team:
Imagine that you are the last player on the varsity ladder, and you are playing a challenge match against the number one player on the junior varsity. If you win, nothing will change. But if he or she wins, you will be demoted to JV. The coach is cool, the team is hang-loose, but the dark JV locker room is straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Imagine further that a match point arises against you. You are returning serve. Your opponent hits her or his first serve to your backhand but it lands just long. You see at the last second that it is out, but you hit the ball back anyway.
That shot doesn’t mean anything in One’s competitive world because it won’t affect the outcome of the match. One disengages his manic attention from this shot, and frets about how to return the next serve. Meanwhile, Two doesn’t care about what is at stake. It cares only about hitting great tennis shots. In our hypothetical it does just that, detonating a topspin (one-handed!) backhand return of the out serve. Of course, since the first serve was out, Two’s epic shot doesn’t count any more than the faulted first serve did.
Now your opponent hits a second serve, again to your backhand, but this time it lands in the service box. As the ball curves in, One’s shrill instructions trigger electrical storms in your prefrontal cortex. One goes into fight or flight mode and recruits the reptilian brain (its partner in the crime of negative thinking), tying Two up in a straight-jacket. You choke and hit a high floater back over the net. Your opponent puts the weak return away, and you and One slink off to drown your sorrows in a bottle of Tequila. Two, on the other hand, just wants to go hit more lovely ground strokes.
I’m no highly trained guru. My attention and thoughts (whether on the court or, as my Dad used to say, sitting cross-legged “contemplating my navel”) wander around like a big dog trying to run on ice. When this happens, Self-One still yaps that I am a bad meditator.
Whatever, dude. Meditation is not a matter of being a failure or a success. My attention to my breathing, the pedal cadence (rpm) while I cycle, or repetition of a mantra will inevitably give way to random thoughts. When I realize that my attention has gone AWOL, I just bring it back to the present. It wanders again, I gently show it back to its seat, and so on and on. That’s mindfulness for you.