Unflappable and Unassailable

Sets 97-98 (of 365):

Stuart vs. C. at Northwest Park. Winner: Stuart 6-1, 6-0.
Ladder Match #9

My Mojo: Confident and Serene

This weekend, I was so frazzled when I was playing. I was tense, angry and tentative. So today I decided to try something a little different.

I remember reading about experiments with meditation in which they sent people to different cities to meditate, and the crime rate went down. Just because there were people who raised the serenity level in their surroundings, the behavior of other people was affected in a positive way, supposedly. Now these are anectodal studies, and I am an eternal skeptic, but people who meditate have tons of stories like this to tell you. Proponents will be happy to tell you about how meditation will lower your blood pressure, help you meet goals in life, make you a happier person, etc.

Like I said, I take all of this with a grain of salt. So today, when I was looking for a different approach, I came home from work, turned off as much external stimulation as I could (no TV, no music, etc.), and just sat down and concentrated (if you can call it that, it was more relaxing) with my eyes shut. I tuned out everything around me and just tried to increase the peacefulness within me. After a while, I became vaguely conscious of my breathing, my heartbeat, and the ambient sounds around me, though I was not really focusing on them. I can't really say what I was focusing on, but it was tranquil.

After about twenty minutes of this, I got in my car and left for the site with enough time to get there early no matter what the traffic was like. I didn't feel rattled by little indignities in traffic, I just felt a vague sense of peace. I got to the site, started to play, and with the exception of an anomalous first game...

Wow.

First, the anomalous first game. Every single point in the game was a major error. For about the first ten points of the game, either my opponent double faulted, or I failed to return his serve. This didn't make me angry or anything, though, I just saw it as kind of goofy and I started laughing about it more and more as it went on. Then we got a couple of rallies going, but each point was still ended with an error. I don't even remember who won...it didn't really seem to matter to me much.

Then, after that, I was almost on top of everything. I felt completely calm and, excuse the cliche, "one with the tennis ball." I got to just about everything that he hit, and placed almost everything exactly where I wanted to put it. My anticipation was great and it was though the points were happening in slow motion. I got to almost everything except for a few absolute winners that he hit. He won only one game the whole match. Many of the games I won were shutouts where he didn't get any points. We did get to a few games where we went to deuce and ad, but I don't think there were any really long games where it went back and forth from deuce to ad a lot. He was playing really well at first but started making more and more errors as the match went on, and he seemed more and more frustrated by not being able to break through.

This was a ladder match and I have won both ladder matches for this round (other than the challenge match which I still have ahead of me) so I should move up on the ladder. The match ended really quickly and I wished I could play another match. Boy, was that a far cry from this weekend, where I had to work on myself really hard to get in shape and perspective to play again. It's hard to know ahead of time how you are going to feel, though...I'm hesitant to schedule a lot of matches in the evenings after work because I don't want to get into a mental state like I did this weekend.