Life's lessons can be learned from the tennis court

Wayne Cope is a man of few words. The fifty-something year old is a creature of simplicity and habit. When his afternoon slot opened up I thought it would be fun to hit with him for an hour, as his expertise are a hot commodity at work. Little did I know that he was about to bestow on me some of life's lessons in the form of a tennis match. Now, he did not bring me out there to lecture me, BUT being a performer and trying to keep my mind open to the world, if you think in metaphors, some of the advice he gave to me in the hour I hit with him were things I could easily apply to my life. Twyla Tharp says, "Metaphor is the vocabulary connecting what we experience now to what we've experienced before." Keep that in mind

It seems pretty simple, right? Hit the little green ball over the net to your opponent (When hitting, as opposed to a game, where you want to hit it NOT to your opponent).
"You're very good," Wayne told me while hugging his racquet, "because you have balance. Lots of people when going after the ball get tired and cannot recover as quickly because they are not so in balance. But you have that going for you."
Balance is so important in life. Learn what your priorities are and keep yourself in check.

Soon after we started the wind picked up. "Hitting with the wind is difficult," Wayne said, "Because you have less control. You might tell the ball to go one way, but the wind carries it somewhere else, so we need to adjust. Don't get frustrated though, with some time and practice, you can learn to read the wind, and anticipate enough to adjust before it's too late."
Some things we just don't have control over. Life happens. It's random and unexpected. But sometimes, if we adjust quick enough, we don't lose sight of our objectives. In my case, a little green ball.

I started thinking about all this and soon Wayne called me to the net. "Now, something has happened in your playing in the last 10 or 15 minutes of play. Are you upset? Something on your mind? Because you seem a little distracted." I shook my head no, I was thinking about tennis (sorta). "Well, you see," Wayne said, "I can tell sometimes when someone isn't truly present in the game. They seem distracted and miss the ball more often. So if you need to stop and reorganize your thoughts we can do that. Otherwise I challenge you to hit as many balls to me as possible without messing up. Think you can do that?"

"I can do it!" I retorted, not wanting our session to be over just yet.

So I went back to my side of the net and took a deep breath. I am infamous for this last one. I look back on my high school career, and the amount of work I loaded onto my plate in order to ignore my surroundings. My work ethic to work to get to a finished product and not learn from the experience. I work in the future, and almost never live in the present. This is something I have been working on for a while now, but Wayne caught me. I am guilty as charged. So I put the draft of the blog in my head on save for a moment to finish our hour of hitting.

"Well done," Wayne said at the end. "I knew I could get you to focus. Normally when you present someone with criticism, they rise to your challenge. I could tell you were with me that last round. Good work for today. With practice, you could do this."

When you receive criticism, it is normally with love. Mentors and teachers will try and change you for the better, and sometimes they have an eye for something you can't see. See their challenges. Rise to the occasion.

As I left after the hour, I realized my blog might not be full of every word of wisdom bestowed on me by Wayne, But I would settle for 3 main points since I was trying to focus on the here and now, instead of my mind-numbing to do list. I cannot stress as wayne did the importance of staying focused. Jesus says "Stay awake, for you do not know the hour when the Lord will come." If we waste time, sometimes we miss life. Don't miss life.

Harold Hill in "The Music Man" sums it up by saying "Pile up enough tomorrows and you'll find you've collected nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering."

Wayne is not a philosopher by any means, but the simplicity in his tips were so profound, that i can't help but hope that someone cancels on him again in the near future so I can learn from him again.