Since I have joined the company I am currently working in, the predominant form of entertainment is Table Tennis (or as the Americans know it Ping-Pong). I don't consider myself the expert in it, given the fact that I have not had much chance to play TT before. But I am at getting good at it pretty fast.
Being a popular entertainment here the table is almost always busy and playing a singles game should be considered a windfall, and a double's game doesn't improve your skills very much. I play with colleagues who are of varied talent. District champions to learning-to-hold-the-bat. I find that there is so much variety in the way one can approach a ball, be it while serving, returning, smashing or blocking. The key is to develop a varied skill-set and to know what to use when, and do it consistently correct. I have a friend-cum-roomie, who in my observation neither has a varied skill-set in the game, nor is conventional. But he is surprisingly correct, and consistently so. The win-loss ratio between the two of us is already heavily tilted on his side. During the last two days it only got worse for me. I lost 3-4 yesterday and 0-7 today. It didn't really bother me till we finished the games. But now that I am alone, it is humiliating. It completely clouds my mind. Thoughts like,
"There a few instances that I pulled back from behind to level, only to give it all away".
"The fact that he has been playing longer than me doesn't help. I have been playing long enough to start winning. After all, I do have some skills that I have learnt".
annexes the mind. The mind refuses to relinquish the thought and move on to more important things to do. On the contrary, it only compounds the problem. Now I don't feel like doing the more important things to do. All of a sudden, I feel like I am doing a useless job, I reject the evening plans to roam around because, all of a sudden, I don't like the city anymore and want to go back to Chennai, and I get unreasonable when friends play a harmless prank on me.
2 comments:
Badri in Matrix style:
You already have made the choice. All you have to do now is try to understand why you made it?
:)) romba thathuvama iruka???
Badrhi, is table tennis to become your life's work, or is it merely a pleasurable game with which to pass the time?
I faced a comparable situation with bowling. I took up bowling in a league one night a week when I was a little younger than you are now. I eventually started bowling two nights a week, and my average was up to 165, which was better than most people in my leagues.
But then I hit a plateau. I was not getting any better, or worse. I got frustrated by my inability to improve. I realized to get better, then I would need to bowl three times a week. But I did not want to dedicate that much of my life to bowling, so I gave up the sport entirely.
If I could not get better bowling as much as I was, and I could not enjoy bowling at my current level of accomplishment, then there was no point in pursuing it any further.
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