Category Archives: drawing

Is Professional Tennis a Healthy Endeavor?

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Lately I’ve been viewing a series of programs about the lives of professional tennis players. The athletes that achieve elite status in the tennis world have usually been recognized as prodigies at an early age, as having unique hand to eye skills and an exceptionally strong drive to excel. In the interest of improving, competing with the best, the sport for these folks becomes of singular importance often taking them on an emotional roller coaster as their successes and failures on the court mount up.


Since in each tournament, sometimes involving nearly 100 players to begin, everyone other than the eventual winner will lose, the psychological impact of losing can be devastating for these hard-working athletes causing them to question whether they belong, hence the need for an entourage of supporters encouraging, reassuring them to continue that they have the potential to rebound from defeat. Most will experience the highs of winning but the emotional and physical intensity will eventually take its toll. Few players are able to maintain a career at the elite level for more than a few years.


As the spotlight dims, I guess the considerable monetary payback most of these players have realized will help them ease into a more conventional life, but I wonder how difficult it might be to find fulfillment after living such a high intensity reality.

Remembrances

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When I was seven years old my family moved from a small house in town near the railroad tracks to another small house in the country, notable for its proliferation of mouse droppings and cold winter drafts. Though a bit strapped financially, my father, always thinking of family first, acquired a small black and white television set. Undeterred by the fuzzy picture my siblings and I sat mesmerized as Pinky Lee, an androgenous little man in suit and bowler hat thrilled us with his antics and old cartoons.

I became friends at this time with Keith, a year younger, who lived on the neighboring farm. We spent happy hours in the farms’ large barn swinging from ropes into the loose hay in the hayloft. Keith’s mother, the very model of maternal care, would make us small afternoon lunches that we would take up onto one or another of the farm’s outbuildings to enjoy. Other days were spent on the shore of the lake just beyond the cow pasture, building forts from downed tree limbs, enacting various imagined scenarios.

All of the adults in our lives were caring and dependable, assuring these times were carefree and allowing us the freedom to enjoy our youthful naivete. One wonders, now, if the rich imaginative life we enjoyed then makes up in any way for our delayed ability to assume responsibility.

Mental Changes

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Experiencing, as I am, the mental changes of aging, I’m finding certain positives occurring. Although being unable to remember what I had for dinner two hours after eating can be annoying, the advantages of ‘forgetting’ an unappealing event or appointment, accepted as excusable, has its advantages. On the downside, along with the short-term memory loss comes the inability to keep up with conversational topic switches, as when talk of a fishing trip abruptly segues to local politics.

All in all, I guess one must cheerfully accept the inevitable decline aging presents and stay upbeat. One’s longevity likely depends on it.

Playing it Safe

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I’ve been thinking lately how one might exercise a desire to build a safe and insular world for oneself. By cultivating relationships one can dominate and carefully avoiding social interactions one might suppose would threaten discomfort, one might find an ideal peacefulness. One would suppose such an organized life to be an anxiety free one where there is no need for any sort of stoic discipline to ward off unpredictable negatives. I’m sure there are those who would say such a construct would be devoid of richness, of the thrills and excitement that uncertainty promises, but a well-grounded, intelligent and thoughtful individual would surely realize a contentment that supersedes adventurism.

The pitfalls of playing it safe.

When You Die You WILL Meet God

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Driving down the highway the other day I saw a billboard that informed me that when I die, I will meet God.

I got to thinking about just how that conversation might go. I suppose the gist of it would concern how deserving I was; whether I was of sufficient character to join the heavenly host, whether my behaviors during my biological existence made me eligible for other-worldly benefits.

Would I be asked, I wonder, if my behaviors were reasonably upstanding, my thoughts of a benevolent if not pristine nature. Of course God, I assume, would have the answers to those questions and was playing a bit of a game with me to determine how I might spin the narrative, but, in honesty I would have to respond that in my opinion my good behaviors at least balanced the bad, evaluated on the basis of intent to contribute, on the one hand, or exploit, on the other, my fellow man.

So, if God scores on a curve, I guess my odds of reaching the great beyond aren’t too bad.

The Rest of the Story

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I’ve been thinking lately about the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham, the father, is challenged by God to justify his faith by sacrificing his beloved son Isaac. The man and son make their way to the mountaintop, the son prostrates himself upon a rock, the father lifts a large knife………. but then God intervenes and acknowledges Abrahams unwavering faith.

After the event God assures Isaac that he was really in no danger, that it was only a test, but one has to wonder how Isaac thereafter felt about familial relationships, how he afterwards perceived his father’s mental health, how he might have wondered how benevolent God actually is and finally what it means to be truly alone in the world.

I guess the moral of the story is: beware of parents who claim to be in direct communication with a less than benevolent God.

Accommodating the Uncomfortable

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I’m anticipating, as summer approaches, extended social encounters I will likely find uncomfortable. The realization that my visitors live their lives within realities different than mine, that the narratives they spin are often contradictory to my own makes for a certain tension, always present and energy sapping.

The rule to avoid talk of religion and politics is always warranted but even with that, philosophical conflicts are bound to occur. In other years I have relied on a bit of chemical numbing to see me through but I’m aware now, as my functioning slows, my ability to quickly retort wains, I must take care, to stay articulate so as not to produce even greater discomfort.

But, as you might have guessed, these visitors are family and the value of maintaining an open communication with them may be the most important thing I ever do.

The Downside of the Reformation

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I’ve been reading that, while the reformation of the Christian Church in 16th century Europe, the establishment of Protestantism in reaction to a corrupt Catholic Church, would, on the face of it, appear to be a time of enlightened reform, quite the opposite was true.

Luther’s translation of the Bible into German made it available to a laity that was then able to form churches based on their understanding of Biblical truth, which tended to vary, sometimes considerably, from one congregation to the next. This precipitated accusations of heresy and totalitarian mindsets closed to sectarian differences, leading to an intolerance greater even than that of the Catholic hierarchy.

These issues were all pretty important back then, people believing, as they did, that Hell was in store for most of the population.

Fear of the Unknown

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I’ve been viewing maps recently that were produced during the Middle Ages. It has become clear to me that the early cartographers needed to rely on a certain amount of imagination to create a geographic depiction of the world. The church at the time took pains to build a Biblically favorable geography that had little to do with reality.

I’m wondering how a medieval intellect, a contemplative sort, sitting on the beach looking westward out across the Atlantic Ocean might have imagined what lay beyond. Many sailors of the time feared sailing too far west lest they fall off the edge of the world. Nightmares of an awaiting Hell so nearby must have terrified the medieval mind.

These days the contemplative sort might be looking upwards, outwards, imagining the earth being sucked into a black hole or being overwhelmed by dark matter and being no less terrified than his medieval forbearer. Fear of the unknown is the constant I guess for all of humankind.

A Dark Age

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I’ve been reading about the intellectual world in Western Europe as it existed in the early centuries of the second millennium.

With the fall of Roman Civilization 600 years earlier, scholarship had declined, knowledge of the past had been reduced to monastic reproductions of Latin texts providing the church the opportunity to re-imagine the historical narrative to its own advantage, limiting it to a closed Christian perspective and its reliance on the ‘Word of God’ to explain the complexities of the natural world.

This constrictive culture led the few scholars of the time, whose concern for self-preservation amid accusations of heresy, to temper any announcements of research findings setting back intellectual development for centuries.

The eventual breaking free of such a restrictive situation can only be attributed to the indomitable human spirit, even though it did take a long time.