By Mark Rearden, West Lake Country Club | February 1, 2020
About this time of year I generally dedicate “Mark My Words” to some renewal of spirit and awakening of sorts for the coming season. The end of the year is certainly a good time to reflect on the year gone by and consider what this next one may have for us. My advice has always been to be proactive with regard to what you want to accomplish. I am very much a proponent of breaking the coming year into two six months segments and defining what goal you want fulfilled within each segment. Experience has taught me that when players have a clear vision of what they want to accomplish and a plan for doing so, they typically reach their goal. As you set your goals in tennis for the remainder of 2020 rest assured your primary coach will want to help in whatever way they can to help you reach your dream.
I want to stray from the norm however and share with you a recent epiphany that came as a result of conversations I had with some former students. During a wedding party I recently attended for a former junior player, I found myself chatting with players who are now away at college or who are out in the workforce. They seem so pleased to share stories of their new independence, their tribulations along the away, and to just reminisce about the old days. In each of the cases there seemed to be an interesting side note. Take a wild guess what subject matter was curiously absent from most all of our conversations. Tennis! Now don’t get me wrong, tennis was certainly mentioned but only as a precursor to the conversation, an obligatory offering to the guy they had spent hours on court with.
Absolutely no one talked of their wins over Jenny the Jerk or how persistent work on their serves eventually yielded a great big old kick serve. No one even talked about how good it made them feel to reach their goal of being # whatever in the state or south. All of our conversation was about the things that happened along the way. We talked of how many push-ups Chris had to do for angrily hitting a ball into my chest during clinic, how funny it was when Morgan threw up in front of a bunch of customers at the Huddle House, and what an insufferable “suck-up” Lauren was. We talked about funny stories, about integrity issues and where their life is headed now.
So what have I gleaned from all this, what is my epiphany? To begin with, I still believe that goal setting and aspiring to reach a higher peak are the things that spur us on along the way. Once we reach that peak, however, it no longer holds that same desirable elusive quality. So, as success-oriented achievers, we set more goals. I do think this is good, but it does have a certain Sisyphean quality about it. But what I have learned from this wonderful collection of young adults is that maybe, just maybe, it’s not about reaching the goal, but savoring the journey. Every single one of them remembered the paths they all climbed together and all seemed to cherish those memories so much more than the summits they reached.
My encouragement for you is this: to set ambitious goals and put in place a means for achieving those goals, but consider that the journey along the way is quite possibly more important than the goal itself. Good luck with your goals going forward, but don’t forget to sniff a rose or two. Mark my words, it will make a difference.