me I hadn’t touched a tennis racket in almost 20 years when last month I decided to join an adult clinic at local courts. I thought hitting a ball might help release the tension that keeps me up in the middle of the night, it might squeeze me the way my kids get squeezed at camp, after which they come home and sleep soundly. Tennis players range from college graduates to septuagenarians. Some days 12 people show up and we play; others, only two, and we do drills. I used to play as a kid, and I was terrible back then: competitive and erratic, a lethal combination that had me cursing a blue streak, throwing my racket with abandon, and gritting my teeth for hours after a losing match. Now, like then, I’m terrible. And yet, I discovered that I am also deeply happy being terrible.
buzz! There goes my backhand, sailing over the fence. LOL! There’s that serve, which could be in, if only my opponent was on the next court. The pros smile quietly as we toss balls back and forth, like we’re playing on the moon. Some of us are better than others, but we all exist comfortably in the “pretty mediocre” range, and no one cares, least of all me. Compliments buzz freely and nice tries they are a constant.
We’re scheduled during lunch, when the summer sun burns the courts clear of spectators or serious athletes, who are all at home icing their elbows or adjusting their rackets or whitewashing their whites or polishing their marble busts of Federer or whatever they do. in his time without a match. Some days preschool campers play alongside us, their counselors teaching them the fundamentals of hand-eye coordination by tossing balls into the air for them to run and fetch. They spin around, panting like puppies on the loose in a bumper-filled bowling alley, and alongside them, we do the same thing, a multi-generational desecration of the sport. It’s an image straight out of John McEnroe’s worst fever dream.
However, I keep coming back. One reason is that he’s so unsocial, after so many years of panicked, enforced isolation and somber solo jogs. The small talk we have with each other when we switch sides, or stop for a drink of water, or cheer each other on, are part and parcel of the weak ties that so many psychiatrists shouted from the rooftops that we had lost in the past. few years, and they are so critical to our well-being.
Another is that even though I know I’m going to suck, the stakes are so high that I can actually lean into my sucking, something that can be a palliative for stressed and anxious people (read: almost everyone, or 87% if you need a number(at least according to the latest Stress in America™ survey from the American Psychological Association, published in March). And it’s a corrective that other people have recognized and touted for years, and one that seems particularly relevant now, as we hurtle into another uncertain plunge, with the world literally on fire and the future so bleak that people have reportedly I stop reading the news altogether, unable to bear another tragic headline. Low-risk activities and accepting mediocrity can be a good tool to have in your self-help kit.
“In the process of trying to achieve a few moments of happiness,” Karen Rinaldi wrote of her terrible surfing on a viral opinion piece later expanded in the book (It’s Great to) Suck at Something, “I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring is revealing.” In the book’s introduction, he urges us to consider the importance of “celebrating the art of making life of doing something seemingly irrelevant, especially when the rest of your life is being drawn into resounding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, weighty relevance.” ”.
I suck so bad right now. I suck for not watching five episodes of The Bear and going to bed on time. I suck at putting my three-year-old to bed, which means almost every night ends with me curled up in a pink kid-sized chair while she barks orders at me. I suck at not eating handfuls of Goldfish when I forgot lunch. And in each of these moments, however small, the stakes feel legitimate: that my emotional reserves will dry up and disappear with each lost hour of sleep; that I have failed to be an authority figure for my children, with any future ramifications that may have; that my body will one day simply shut down, after it can no longer extract Pepperidge Farm’s enriched wheat flour for the folic acid it so desperately needs. For the most part, I’m afraid that what I’m doing wrong is being an adult.
In tennis, if I suck, it doesn’t really matter.
This week, coinciding with a break in our work schedules, my husband asked me if I wanted to hit. He’s good, really good, having competed seriously in high school, but we hadn’t played together in years, after a terrible game shortly after college. My competitive streak was still on fire back then, and after I demanded he play to win and then got crushed, I vowed we would never go back on the court without a match counselor present as referee. With my new found love of mediocrity, I thought we might give it a try. And aside from the fact that he kept yelling “FINGERS ON!” every time I didn’t adjust to the ball fast enough, some weird holdover phrase he learned when he was coached years ago, we had a great time, and we just played for points towards the end. We walked off the court tied, and yes, it felt fantastic to take those winners away from him, even if I knew, deep in my bones, that he was playing me.
And so, in the heat of summer, before that nostalgic camp-type window closes and we return to our daily grind, with our pencils sharpened and our eyes on heavy, amorphous relevance, I urge you to join me in metaphorical court. Who knows? You too can be terrible or at least mediocre. Here is the hope.