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Greek to Me
Game, Set, Match
© 2009 by Michael Raysses
The phrase “modern medicine” has to be one of contemporary life’s great riddles. If medicine exists for the general betterment of people at large, why is it that today we have more diseases than ever? Arguably, it’s because no one makes money off of you and your good health. The health care industry, the pharmaceutical companies and mass media all benefit by you recognizing your diseased state and making sure you don’t find any cures too quickly.
From there things get even murkier because I can’t even begin to think about healing until I have answered the question of what is being cured. Who decides what ails me? And how do they determine what constitutes disease?
Twelve years ago, I was stricken with an ailment for which I had no name. At the time, I had been divorced for over a year. I was living in a studio apartment in a predominantly Russian neighborhood where the saving grace was a park at the end of the block. My “disease” was that I was depressed in the garden variety way that one’s life can be when they wake up to find their days are nothing they recognize or want.
But that was just the general wash of things. Specifically, I was suffering from the inability to experience enjoyment. Nothing felt actively good to me: everything I ate tasted like Braunschweiger; communicating with others provided no solution because everyone’s voice sounded like fingernails running across the blackboard of my soul. Life sucked a little less when I found out this state of being had a name:
Anhedonia.
It sounded like something out of a Marx Brothers’ comedy. In fact, the word had a cinematic connection: it was the working title for Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall.
Anyway, I had become the de facto president of the Anhedonia Club by the day when everything changed. Up until that time, the only activity that didn’t deepen my depression was exercise. Every day I would walk to the park up the street. There was a small area with chin-up bars and other assorted equipment for various gymnastics. The place teemed with elderly men from Eastern European countries who wouldn’t acknowledge you unless you spoke their language, which only added to my sense of isolation.
But on this morning, as I rested between sets of dips, I heard something so unmistakably alluring, I couldn’t ignore it. It was the sound of people deeply immersed in bliss. It came from four men in the adjoining tennis court, playing a heated but good-natured set of doubles. I peered through the screen that separated the court from the park—there they were. Men my age and older, running around, swatting a fuzzy green ball, oblivious to everything but their own delight because they were fortunate enough to be there, playing like school kids, when others their age were most likely wedged behind desks, working jobs that could never offer this kind of ecstasy.
That’s when I decided I was going to get my own version of that vision. So I became the most ardent, self-taught tennis player in the park. I bought a second-hand racquet and a case of new balls and thus began my cure.
The game was a natural fit for my sensibilities. On its surface, it was extremely physical. But the more I learned, the more I realized it was a lot like the games of chess the Russian men played not more than an errant forehand away from the tennis courts. Tennis was all about moves and countermoves, with decisions about what to do and how to do it being made in an instant.
I was playing at least four times a week. I made friends with people I played with, or by watching them play and then asking about their game and how they perfected certain strokes. Arguably, I was well on my way to healing my depression as the result of this fantastic sport and the manner in which it engaged me. But the real test came as the result of the most ignored part of the game.
Tennis is the only sport I know of where you commence the offensive portion of the game by essentially throwing yourself the ball, which you then serve to your opponent. Watching players do it lends great insight into their state of mind because at any point when tossing the ball into the air to serve, if you give yourself a bad throw or the wind blows it off course even just a bit, you are allowed to bring the ball down and start over. But, more importantly, keeping track of my own habits, I noticed that it was something I rarely did. I thought I was being picky and petty.
Oddly enough, the day that I knew I was really free from the shadow I had been living under was the day I was able to pull the ball down with no judgment about what it meant to do so, other than that I was going to give myself a better chance to excel.
Before I found tennis, I had consulted a therapist. There was even a suggestion that I should embark on a regimen of anti-depressants. Somehow, I just knew that my cure was not in a pill. I am not saying drugs can’t be helpful. What I am saying is that you need to participate actively in coming to an understanding of what ails you, and what the cure is going to look like. And when in doubt, don’t forget tennis and the score at the outset of every game: love-love. Nothing will serve you better.
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator living in Los Angeles. E-mail him at MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.