Aim Higher
“Aim higher,” the tennis guru said as my forehand laced with topspin slammed into the tape on the top of the net. “Really?” I thought (and I think I said out loud.) “You get paid to tell people THAT?”
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We laughed. The kind of innocent release that pops out from the bottom of your belly once the clutter is removed. Him in his floppy sun hat, even though we were indoors. Me with my bulging neck veins, even though no one was watching and we weren’t keeping score.
The teacher fed me another ball.
This one flew off my racket strings shaping its way beautifully through the air before landing deep just inside the baseline of the opposite court. My spinning forehand cleared the net with at least three feet to spare.
We laughed again. Him (I can only imagine), because he’s seen this work before. Me, in spite of myself.
Not one thing changed except the place I chose to put my eyes.
It’s funny where we aim and why we don’t. We know how much the target matters and yet our focus flits because the mind is constantly under siege. We get caught in the cerebral crossfire of “shoulds” and “musts” and “don’ts” and “couldn’ts” until eventually the information our brains need most becomes an afterthought. (If even a thought at all.) It’s such a simple concept: aim. And yet we often scoot right past it in pursuit of complex fixes. Surely the smothering of my forehand had something to do with my grip…or the point of contact…or the angle of the racket head as I struck the ball. Or maybe it was really the fault of my follow through? Surely I hadn’t simply forgotten where to look.
It's amazing how easy it can be to make things hard.
The battle-tested recipe for hitting a bullseye is simple. “Ready, Aim, Fire.” This iconic three-step process is how you get from here to there. And yet we often skip the middle without even knowing that we have.
It occurred to me that day while re-learning how to learn, that our eyes always go somewhere whether we tell them where to look or not. In the chaos of all that could be wrong or might be tweaked, I had unintentionally buried the lead. My eyes without a directive had defaulted to the obstacle in the way. Although I’d failed to realize it, I was aiming at the net I was trying not to hit.
We go where our eyes go. Aiming higher usually helps.