The primary task of an athlete is mastery. Mastery of so many minute and continually recurring tasks. And this is what I can't stop thinking about. What does it entail after all? Control, of course, but that's surely only a first step. For ultimate control, final, comprehensive control, is never possible. Thus, if mastery exists at all, mustn't it involve to a tremendous extent the ability to accept the unalterable universe? The force of that universe, the limits it imposes? Isn't mastery then, primarily a function of knowledge? Of understanding limits, possibly even delighting in them?
The question is how to arrive at that delight. For the process of coming to understand one's limits (of endurance, of skill, of creativity, of determination and patience) is a miserable business. Nothing but the serial experience of thwarted objectives. Whence, out of such grand frustration, might satisfaction finally arise? Whence derives our ineradicable certainty that mastery is its own reward?
Of course the question doesn't apply only to athletes. Rather, it applies to anyone whose life is or has become a second-by-second challenge. For it is in that continual drip of seconds that the most fearsome desires come: for relief, or achievement, finally. Relief from pain or tedium, relief from the weight of insignificance. Achievement of recognition. The flaring of such desires is a temptation away from mastery. And mastery, in turn, is the knowledge that those desires, because they will never relent no matter how many external consolations we obtain, are immaterial. Mastery is its own reward, it is the comprehensive acceptance of disappointment, and it is the only thing we can ever really accomplish.
This was surely all worked out by a small Asian man in the 9th Century B.C., but it's helpful for me to parse it afresh now as I count hours and cycles of treatment, and as I try to assess the potential yet remaining in my body, its capacity to run, jump, lift, breathe, ride, walk, stand and so on, in spite of so many inducements no longer to do any of the above. Really, I don't know how cancer patients think of anything else...
I feel like an athlete.
