I was playing tennis earlier today. We were just the three of us, so we played one man against a pair, and alternated every two games. Initially, the only thing I could do well was serve, but thanks to some hopeless hitting, I lost my service games rather quickly. Unable to win, and unable to hit a decent shot, I told myself that it was only a practice session, and that I could afford to concentrate on playing well, not necessarily on winning. Surprisingly, I started winning a few games, both while playing alone and playing with a partner. Three games in particular were really satisfying. In the first one, I was serving 0-40, and came back to win it with some good serving, setting up easy volleys for my partner to put away. In another (playing without a partner), I broke the serve of one of the best players here, and then held serve with a couple of aces and an equal number of service winners. Needless to say, I lost the next game ;-)

The insignificance of the morning session aside, the thing I want to talk about is the approach I had to the game today, and how it seemed to have made a difference. When I started off playing with an intention to win, I was losing miserably, and not getting any sort of timing or control on my strokes. But when I started playing with an intent to hit the ball well, my winning percentage improved. It reminded me of my college days when I would play to achieve perfection in stroke execution. (I had once mentioned to a friend of mine that I was trying to find self-expression on the sports field. That’s true of me even today.) Of course, winning mattered to me then even more than it matters to me now, but somewhere along the way, I had let the desire to win subjugate my desire to play a perfect game, and my game has suffered for it.

Age doesn’t always bring wisdom. In many cases, it corrupts our mind, making us forget our joys as children / young men when we toiled to develop certain skills, unmindful of the innumerable hours spent training our bodies and minds to obey our will. The joy of producing a well-timed shot – even if it is not an outright winner – is far greater than that of winning a point by waiting for your opponent to commit an error. Though all this may seem to apply mostly to amateurs, even professional sports-persons like the legendary tennis player Steffi Graf have been known to play with the hope of hitting “the zone” that some, or probably most, of us are familiar with.

Letting go of the desire to win lifts a heavy weight off your mind and allows you to be free and unshackled. This in turn lets you concentrate on the immediate present: you no longer play with a view to winning the entire match right from the word go, playing instead to win the point. Of course, if you continue to play well, you may just win the last point, which, at least as far as tennis is concerned, is the same as winning the match :-)

The quest to attain perfection is not necessarily an abstract pursuit. It’s an attempt to be the best you can be; it’s an attempt to find the latent superhuman in you; it’s a technique to detach yourself from expectations; it is a test of, and a push to extend, your limits. It is also a way to focus your mind, emptying it of everything but the present moment; a way to stay at the cutting edge of awareness. In many ways, it’s like a quest to attain the state of Zen – ever mindful of the goal called perfection, never of what that success might bring.