The Zen of Paddle Ball

I was never an athlete as a child.  I played baseball one summer after third grade, then hung up my glove - a story for another time.  I never played basketball, and I avoided playing football.  Frankly, I was one of those kids that avoided the ball and was afraid of it.  The ball represented the enemy.  The ball had to be mastered, or else it would master and ridicule you.  I avoided eye contact with the ball because making such contact would mean I would have to engage with the ball.  An adversary who cannot muster enough courage and determination to look his enemy in the eye cannot have any hope of prevailing.

These thoughts flitted through my mind yesterday morning as Mark and I were playing paddle ball.  And then I had a sort of epiphany.  My tendency, in playing paddle ball, had been to go out and "meet" the ball before it came to me.  This resulted in less than ideal control of the ball - of where and how far it was hit.  What I started doing yesterday morning was letting the ball come to me, rather than me going out to meet it.  

The result was not only far more control over the ball, but, increasingly, a sense that the ball was not my enemy, but my friend - and I came to feel much more of a connection to the game which was much more intuitive and instinctual.  

Then, another realization came to me - the true Zen moment - when I realized how in life we often rush out to meet challenges, unprepared, unfocused, unintuitively; and in the process, we either lose control of our reaction or do not resound in as focused or skillful a way as we might hope.  How much better, I thought, to allow the challenge to come to us, whereupon we can then respond in a much more focused and intuitive manner that is also characterized by acceptance - rather than fear - of the challenge.