Less Tension

This past May, I started playing tennis.

I've played backyard "smashfest" tennis (we'd stand at the baseline and swing away for three hours and hit about 10 shots in bounds) with my brothers before but I have never been serious or systematic about learning the game.  So to get outside more and run around, I grabbed my racquet and signed up for group classes this summer.

And it took only two short months for me to develop horrible, awful tennis elbow.  I've never, ever had that issue in the past but holy cow; had I been smart and listened to my body, I would've been sidelined for awhile.  Instead, I pressed ahead.  It wasn't until early November that I started taking a lesson with a different coach who, within about 12 minutes, said, "Your grip is way too tight.  I bet you're feeling that in your elbow."

Yes, sir.  Yes I was.

The next four lessons, every time I stepped up to the ball, he would say, "Katie, loosen your grip." "Katie your grip is too tight."  "Get loose." "Take a deep breath." "KATIE. LOOSEN. YOUR. GRIP."  For two hours, this mantra played on repeat.  Sometimes I'd get frustrated and completely annoyed. And then, after I realized I was not going to cure this in an hour, I started internalizing it.  It became like a heartbeat.  And when I really concentrated--I mean like beads-of-sweat-forming-on-brow-from-thinking--and I promised myself I would get it all together, and I let go and relaxed...magic. That shot would drop just on that baseline with power but also with finesse.  I think that happened, like, twice.  But in those two times, I could both see and feel the balance, the interplay, of strength and release.  I needed to play tennis to understand yoga.

Because this was such a mantra for those two hours, I found this message appearing to me at other times throughout my day and one day it finally landed as though I had never even heard it before.

 "Katie, loosen your grip.  You're holding on too tight."  

I almost laughed at how obvious the message was, as if the Universe was like, "um, right...I wondered how long it would take you to realize that I wasn't channeling this to you because I think you'll make it big at Wimbledon some day." DUH. Everywhere I looked in my life, I could immediately see tension. And of course I knew it was there all along.  I'm not so unaware of myself that I can't see I'm tied up in knots all the time.  But I was seeing it in a new light; maybe there was another way. Was I worried about things out of my control? Yes.  Was I holding on to anger and frustration about things in the past? Yes.  Was I feeling under-appreciated  without good reason? Yes.  Was I wanting things to be different? Yes.  I mean, like, every nook and cranny of my life had tennis elbow; so much fretting, so much fear.  I was suffocating everything to the point that no day or occurrence or moment had a chance to be seen as joyful or hopeful. And everything was showing signs of the wear and toll of tension.  Like a body gets tight, achy, and generally out of sorts, that's exactly how I felt about life in general; my heart and mind were boxed in, cramped, and struggling to breathe.

This diagnosis for my tennis game was nothing short of revolutionary.  In the moments I was able to let go, I tapped into power and grace that I didn't even know I had at my disposal. But loosening my tennis grip has been one of the steepest challenges I've ever met.  Finding it requires so much quiet, calm patience because gripping your racquet is very much like breathing: fundamental but not necessarily something you ruminate on with every swing.  So now when I approach the ball, I have to think on every shot, "am i gripping too tight? Loosen."  If I don't think it, I am surely gripping too tight.  And Ramon is right there to say, "Katie.  Loosen your grip."  And the only way to cure it is to not get tight when you realize you're not doing it.  This is about changing a response that feels innate.  In life, I know, most of my successes and what I'm known for is my brute strength (I'll push through, I'll get it done, I'm a workhorse.) Now my approach requires that I forge a new path...one that isn't something I'm familiar with.  One that seems very counter-intuitive to the goal.

Loosen.  Loosen.  Stay Loose.  Loose.  Loose. Loose.

And of course, that's true for life too.  To apply this there's a vigilance that I have to choose to maintain.  But the outcome will always be worth it.  I have had few moments of such joy that could equal the times that I hit that tennis ball correctly and see how beautifully graceful that shot is...and it's usually a winner.

I'm just starting to understand what loosen could do for me in my life but it's obvious that it could be a real game-changer there, too.  The mantra has been switched on.  Now it's time to practice.

Reflections

I have always written.  I started keeping journals when I was in grade school and I kept paper journals clear on through college and beyond.  And I didn't keep them.  It was not for edification or for some other reason than that was the medium through which I processed life.  And then there were the blogs...oh the blogs.  So much weird, wandering writing just sitting out there with no one looking at it.  Same purpose.  There is something to be said for sitting down and just thinking something through.

And then I wrote a dissertation, a process that completely changed my interior life.  Always an avid reader, I found myself shying away from that place of imagination; fantasy, fiction, and just the simple act of reading before bed all at once left me cold and, oddly, restless.  Similarly, always an avid writer and content with no audience but myself, my writing style and the process of it became stilted, rigid, and uncomfortable.  Words on a page, whether written by me or someone else, became restless and uncomfortable.  Imagine my loneliness (and other readers can and will).  What once was such a joyful space had transformed into something full of anxiety and unrest.

As I was wrestling with this the other day, forcing myself to read before bed (and actually winning that battle thanks to a series my friend Paul turned me onto by Andrea Camillieri, who is a man, by the way), I began to think that just like every other habit, reading and writing again are things I can cultivate.

But I have to try.  And I have to be willing to stick with it for awhile.  And I have to re-orient myself to that space and discover again that it, in fact, is not something to be endured, as writing had become for some many years in recent past, but that it can be and should be the chosen expression of one's best self, especially someone who revels and fascinates on the world of ideas.  

So I've been trying to figure out how, exactly, to go about this and sometimes when one asks, inspiration gives one a break and responds in very obvious terms.  There is a movement in writing called NaNoWriMo, which is a collective promise that writers make to themselves and others that in the month of November they're going to write a certain amount of words everyday for a certain total at the end of the month.

Obviously, I'm late to that bandwagon but inspiration told me that I should do this instead: 

Reflect on the same theme every day for the entire month of December.  If successful, do the same thing on a new theme for January.  Don't think farther ahead than January.

It actually spoke to me that exact way and it was so simple and straightforward that I'd be remiss not to take heed.   So that's what I'm going to do.  I attempted this only half-heartedly in November, trying to reflect on "less" and I nailed it in spirit as I only wrote four things of very dubious quality.  BUT, I'm going to take the last weeks of November here to get ready for December and I'm going to do the same with "less" for the rest of November.  There are no other rules except that I have to write something every day which is not a rule but instead a commitment.

I am very curious to see what happens.

And I am contemplating on asking others to try doing the same and seeing what happens then.  I've already got the December theme picked out.  I can wait to reveal it.  It'll be something I've never really thought about before.