Nat

The end of vacation is bittersweet, of course. It is always hard to reconcile the feeling of being completely relaxed with the imagined pressure of returning full bore into one’s responsibilities. One of the things I’m challenging myself to do this year, though, is to enjoy each nice moment without looking past it toward the next likely challenge.

So here I am, with my wife and stepdaughter safely deposited at the airport, waiting for my later flight in a great independent cafe in Palm Springs. The music and coffee are good. I have a private table with an electrical outlet and a high-speed internet connection. I’ve been able to download some movies and TV shows for my flight later today, and I’m catching up on email.

Palm Springs is one of those places where you can imagine that a large number of residents feel grateful every day for the palm trees, sunshine and mountain views that abound here. We will return next winter, as we did this year, and if we’re lucky, my stepdaughter’s field hockey team will earn an entry into the tournament they hold every Thanksgiving week right up the street from our favorite hotel. It is great fun to think that we would come back here before the end of the year.

In short, I love having a happy experience that I’m likely to repeat in the near future. My wife likes to say that we are creatures of habit, and I guess I would say that she is a creature of habit, but I’m happy to go along when the habits are so entertaining. Palm Desert is great for tennis this time of year, sunny and dry, and I took a lesson yesterday to try to revive my singles game. My instructor, Katie, had a great, easy way of thinking about the game.

Don’t think so much, she told me. It’s a simple game. Get the ball back over the net. She teaches a method that has the following slogan, “Form is not a fundamental.” What it means in the context of tennis is that you are just as likely to be responding to “an emergency situation” as to hit a shot with a perfect setup from a location you expected. Wow, what a life parallel.

In these cases, she says, do your best to get your racket on the ball and try to hang in there for a situation that’s more to your liking. Like all great instruction, and I find this especially from great athletic coaches for some reason, the most useful principles sound like a life philosophy.

So here I am in paradise for a few more hours, seeing my improved forehand approach shot in my mind, loving the bright sunshine on the sides of the Santa Rosa mountains, and thinking that it will be summer soon enough at home.

The Red Sox are winning 10-1 in the 5th inning of the first World Series game. (Now it’s 11-1.) This is a dream come true for a Sox fan like me. I’ve thought often over the years about why watching other people play sports makes so many of us happy. I’m not sure I can really explain it, except that it is great fun to see adults do a job that lets them act like kids.

Last Friday, my wife and I went to the Homecoming football game at our local high school. After falling behind 20-6 at the end of the first half and seeming to be out of the game, they came back in the second half thanks to a fumble returned 98 yards for a touchdown and to 150 yards rushing by their star player. They tied with 2 minutes to go and won in overtime. The fans stomped their feet and chanted, and the coaches ran to the players and tackled them to the ground with joy.

Sometimes I think we don’t allow ourselves to play enough, and at least our emphasis on sports reminds us that games are beautiful and that playing them is a good idea.

It’s now 13-1 at the end of the fifth inning. What a way to start.

It was our third or fourth warm night of the year, and a work colleague invited a group of us to join him in one of the luxury boxes at the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox’s stadium. The suite includes an indoor living room with television, sectional sofa, a few tables, and a large window so you can watch the game.

Through the door is the outdoor seating area, with three rows of seats, the lowest of which is partially below the level of the infield. I sat there most of the evening, talking about nothing of consequence with three of my co-workers.

Several guests brought their young children, which was nice for those that wanted to play and those that wanted to watch the game.

All in all, it was one of those nights of which you think, this is a very relaxing way to be. There must be people who don’t like professional sports, but I’m not one of them. So I watched the hitting and the running of young men chasing a dream. I watched it with men and women who are chasing or have found their own dream, from a really good spot.

I like to be reminded, as often as possible, that life can be sweet right where we are, that our happiness isn’t dependent on where we ultimately think we need to be. That’s how it was for me tonight.

Yesterday I took my second tennis lesson in two days with Dale Light, Director of Tennis at The Boulders Resort in Carefree, Arizona. If you’re ever in the area and like to play tennis, I strongly suggest you take a lesson with him. Dale worked with me on my balance on Monday, correcting a problem with my backhand that I didn’t know I had.

Yesterday, he spoke more philosophically, asking me what my purpose was in playing tennis. He said that development in tennis is just like any other area of your life: having a purpose makes it much easier to progress. I told him that after decades of being an erratic player who made no improvement, I finally wanted to be a player who is comfortable playing with strangers and not feel as if I’m embarrassing myself.

He said he thought those were reasonable goals, and he urged me to address issues of trust and commitment. Trust, he said, that you can figure out how to be ready and how to execute. Then, make a commitment to take the shot, ignoring what the outcome may be. Unless you are a professional, whether you win is not a matter of grave importance. What matters is that you not let your emotions govern your behavior.

What a revelation that tennis is like everything else. We’ll see today how it works.

Amelia Island, Florida, where I arrived this afternoon, has my favorite kind of beach. The beach here is wide with 15 yards of hard sand exposed at low tide, and it’s several miles long in front of our resort. I went for a walk before dinner, up the beach for 15 minutes and then back. A woman was walking her golden retriever. He was a large male with a thick coat and a tennis ball.

I rolled up my jeans and walked just at the water line. A family of sandpipers scampered about in the very shallow water, poking in the sand with their beaks. Flecks of sea foam covered the wet sand up and down the beach. I thought I would walk to the end of the beach and then turn around, but it didn’t end.

As I said, it’s my favorite kind of beach, the kind you can walk up and down until you’re tired, before you’ve run out of beach. There’s a beach like this at the Cape Cod National Sea Shore, and another like it at Hilton Head, South Carolina. There is nothing like the open space, which you can share with wild animals and young families. What a reminder that the world is beautiful.

Today’s USA Today sports section profiles Armintie Price, a basketball player at Ole Miss. Price comes from a tiny town in Mississippi, where she won 15(!) state titles in track and field while becoming a basketball star.

Opposing coaches describe her “unconditional hustle” as inspiring to her teammates and say she is a relentless defender. But the really inspiring part of the story is that she has responded to her mother’s death this year with utter determination and optimism.

Her coach, Carol Ross, has the following beautiful comments about Price,

Every day is more fun because she is so enthusiastic, energetic, passionate. I tell my frineds in coaching, ‘If I could give you one gift, it would be to coach Armintie Price for one day.’ It’s the greatest gift a coach could have.

They are fortunate to have one another.

We’re on vacation this week, and the two best parts of vacation for me are anticipating it and experiencing it. My ambition is to find in my everyday life the same level of expectation for it that I feel when looking forward to vacation.

How do we learn to look forward to every day as if it were special? I’ve been studying my attitude about vacation to help me learn. On vacation, I get to choose what I want to do in what order. I get to spend more uninterrupted time with my wife and stepdaughter. I exercise more. I read more than usual. I go where the weather is good and usually where the sun shines more often and more brightly.

All of those things make me happy. I could work to include any one or more of those elements in each day. Sounds pretty simple.

What would make every day a vacation for you?

I only regret one life decision that I made while I was in college. I never went to study penguins in Chile or Antarctica. Tonight over coffee, I told my friend Brendan that in the mid-80s there was a lot of publicity about penguin research. El nino was a huge weather problem, and someone figured out that penguins were the only animal to adjust their behvior before an el nino pattern began. Soon, lots of organizations were offering grant money to determine how and why they did it.

To make a long story short, I could have applied to join researchers on a 6-month trip to live among the penguins at their nesting grounds in southern Chile. The most charming story I read about these penguins concerns their nighttime game playing. Because they had to sit on the eggs for so long to hatch them, the penguins had developed a game to entertain themselves. Each nesting pair built a small cairn in front of their nest with stones, and at night, the penguins raced around stealing rocks from other birds’ piles and bringing them back to their own piles.

After several weeks in tents in the fields, the researchers were able to join the game. One young scientist wrote about the poetic rush when she was finally in the game herself and she would race toward a bird’s pile, only to feel, literally, a penguin brush her leg as he raced by her on the way to steal her rocks.

I was desperate to do this, but I didn’t. “As charming as that sounds,”Brendan said tonight, “she was living in a tent without cooked food for weeks to get to those evenings. A lot of that life was just tedium, discomfort, and work.”

While I agreed, I still wish that I had played steal the rock from the penguins at night. But Brendan’s point is well taken: what we envy is sometimes just the best part of another person’s experience. And the rest of it may be nothing special.

I told him I envied two types of lives: those where the person races from one true adventure experience to the next and another where the person creates something of consequence for others to use or benefit from. He said that ordinary lives can be happy too.

I still wish I had played with the penguins when I had the chance.

I was going to write a post tonight about static electricity and toilet seat covers. It was going to be funny, and it was going to highlight the importance of finding joy and delight in unexpected places.

Static electricity is funny all by itself, what with shocks and your hair standing on end. My high-school physics teacher, Dr. Perrin, had two PhDs from MIT along with a deadpan sense of humor, which was never more evident than during the lesson on static electricity that he conducted with a pelt the orange cat color of Morris, from the old Nine Lives commercials. He kept referring to the pelt as “my assistant, Morris.”

Anyway, I was at the office today and wondered as I tried to shake the paper seat why I had never noticed this expression of static electricity. It kept being funny.

The point is that it doesn’t take much to make me laugh, and that’s just the way I like it. Dr. Madan Kataria has founded an activity called Laughter Yoga devoted to laughter exercises. Participants gather and laugh on purpose. The laughter builds until it’s cathartic. It didn’t quite come to that in the men’s room at my office, but it could have. It’s the small pleasures that make a good day.

Dr. Kataria notes that the average adult in the west laughed 20 minutes per day a few generations ago. The average is now just 5 minutes per day. Imagine life in 50 years.