Life 2.0 diary - the delicious pointlessness of midlife athletic quest

I am on a quest to figure out 'a life well lived.'

I find my answers via life experiments and then attempt to live according to what I find. This quest led to a sabbatical at 30 (discovering the five foundations to live life on own terms - health, money, relationships, career & identity) and a decade-long quest to put these foundations in place. I then took a gap year @40 in 2021 to explore how I wanted to craft my life in the 40s. By the end of the gap year, I realised I was asking the wrong question. Instead of obsessing with the future life in the 40s, I should ask myself, 'How can I live in the present moment led by what gives me energy and joy NOW?'.?

It sounds good. But will this conclusion, borne in the suspended reality of a gap year, hold up in the messiness of real life??

The only way to find out - live the answer and see where it takes me.

I think of it as a life 2.0 experiment.?I have chosen to arrange my life around areas that give me energy and joy NOW - family & friends, training to play competitive tennis, travel, investing, life-crafting social venture & empty spaces for serendipity.

Today, I share my learnings in one of life 2.0 areas, the midlife athletic quest to become a competitive tennis player from scratch, & what it is teaching me about the nature of life 2.0.

The quest itself is a surprise. It crept up on me unannounced during the gap year, ~8-9 months back. I am still clueless about the WHY. Instead, I have focused on the HOW – the nitty-gritty of pulling together the regimen to train like an athlete. The WHY will reveal itself when ready. My long-term goal is to play in the tennis international 40+ senior tour (recently rebranded to Global Tennis Masters Tour. Apparently, no one likes being called a senior ??)

My quest got off to an interesting start.?

I reached out to a tennis academy coach who listened with an indulgent smile before commenting, 'Yes, senior's tour is not the professional ATP tour. But a typical senior tour player has been playing for 20-30 years since childhood, in college or as a former pro or coach. You can go for it, mate, but it's gonna take a long time. And yeah, beware of injuries, especially at your age!'.?

Injuries! The word I heard & experienced most often in the journey. Your body is not getting any younger; what about knees with all the running; are you sure your body can handle it etc.? I will never know unless I try.

I can't wash away the sins of 40 years in 6 months.?

I focused first 40 years of life 1.0, training my mind to achieve academic and professional goals. My body was secondary, kept healthy enough not to be a barrier to my life goals. Never a priority by itself.?

As I started to lead an examined physical life, what was invisible in everyday life quickly became visible in an athletic quest. My joints had a limited range of motion; my limbs had wooden flexibility; my right shoulder was slightly tilted, and so on.?

However, sins of 40 years can't melt away in a few months. So, I started learning tennis while working on body conditioning in parallel (flexibility, strength, agility).?

As expected, injuries soon started surfacing.?

It started with the lower back - stiffness that refused to melt away. As days passed by, it felt worse. Finally, I made my first-lifetime visit to a physio. In 15 mins, the physio said, 'Oh, you don't have a lower back problem. Your problem is inactive glutes'. In other words, I have been sitting primarily on my bum for the first 40 years studying/ working, and then one fine day, if I start playing tennis every other day, my glutes are still inactive with under-use and not assisting in movement. So, my lower back started compensating by absorbing pressure. Soon enough, it threw up its hands in despair, demanding that each body part needs to do its fair share ???

In the meantime, trouble was brewing in the shoulders. I got excited learning the backhand stroke in one session & hit just too many. Soon, the familiar stiffness, a visit to physio, my first sports injury – long head bicep tendinitis (inflammation of tendons in the left shoulder due to overuse) and advice to 'manage training intensity and load step-up in one session'. Rest and recovery took the next 4-6 weeks.?

As each body part has registered a complaint by now, it makes me wonder if injuries are inevitable in a mid-life athletic pursuit.?

Probably yes. The only way not to get injured is to stop playing.?If I play & want to get better, I will need to keep pushing and testing my limits. Inevitably, I will misjudge at times, i.e., injuries. If injuries are inevitable, what can I learn from them?

A lot, it seems.

Injuries seem to be the gateway to learning and respecting the body's language.?

I learnt in the gap year about the language of kids (listen to the feelings, not words). Similarly, if I can pause and train myself to listen to how my body feels, it seems full of clues about what is going on. For example, initial soreness in the lower back could have been the first distress signal to trigger curiosity. Instead, I ignored it and kept pushing myself. I was listening to the external voice in my head, 'athletes don't pause; they push'. However, to push in awareness of your body seems different from pushing in ignorance based on borrowed beliefs – the fine line between courage and foolishness.?

This tennis quest is also teaching me about the nature of life 2.0.?

1) To have a new passion is to have a new you. I sometimes feel like a stranger to myself. I am still getting used to this new person, an athlete in training. As we move from the overarching singular identity of life 1.0 (often work-centric) to the plural identities of life 2.0 (exploring multiple selves), we might grow a stranger to ourselves in the new quests and thereby be borne anew. Our past might bear little resemblance to our future. I never imagined I would be training to be an athlete. What an exciting (or frightening) thought, depending on the way you look at it ??

2) Slow is fast, and fast is slow. I am becoming aware of the two worlds we inhabit – the human and the natural worlds. We hope to bend the pace of progression to our will when operating in the human world. If we push hard enough, we believe that anything can happen faster. Then, there seems to be the world of nature (including our bodies) wherein spring can't come six months sooner just because we wish it. We must put in the hard work and hope those efforts will show results over time. There are no shortcuts. Here slow is fast, and fast is slow (e.g., resting seems the most challenging part of an athletic quest yet essential for injury prevention). The mindset of a craftsman appears much more at ease with the quests of life 2.0, wherein meaning and joy are in the journey itself, in perfecting the small details, in what we learn every day, versus an end goal obsession to hurry to the end.?

3) How would you live your life if no one else knew or cared about it??We can't escape this question at some point in life 2.0. In life 1.0, any doubts we harbour momentarily about our life choices feel odd. Observing everyone else also running the same race is sufficient validation. Yet, unlike the shared templates/ goals of life 1.0, each life 2.0 journey is unique. Borrowed beliefs & life templates no longer suffice. One must construct one's life around areas that hold a personal meaning for oneself, even if it might baffle others (e.g. mid-life tennis quest??). In life 2.0, we might realise that when something feels right within our hearts, it might be a sufficient basis for us to do it, even though no one else knows or cares about it (which, in any case, no one does, everyone is busy living their own lives ??).

And finally, this tennis journey is teaching me the delicious pointlessness of life 2.0 quests. There is no fame or fortune to be found here in the senior tour, only aches and soreness ??. Yet, the very pointlessness makes it delicious. Once rid of any pretence of external usefulness or relevance, one can settle in one's skin to enjoy what one feels like doing for its own sake. There is gratefulness and sheer joy in being out there on a beautiful morning, hitting balls with a friend. What a lovely sport, and what delicious luck to be able to learn it!

If tennis is your thing, a few books I have liked so far?– levels of the game, string theory, strokes of genius

I love hearing from you. Do share your comments if anything resonates, your take on your own midlife quests or just to say hello as a friend:)

Cheers,

Sameer Srivastav

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