Conditioned Frustration

Like many others, I've found myself far less physically active than I used to be in my youth. There are a lot of reasons for this, between the time commitments devoted to family and kid activities, increasing responsibilities at work and of course I'll own up to some laziness on my part. Tennis was my sport growing up, having played it competitively in high school, and while I played occasionally in college, the opportunities to play have been few and far between.

Since we've moved to the Houston area, my wife and I have had a couple of changes to play tennis. The convenience of having nice courts in our residential subdivision minutes away have made opportunities to play easy, as has the nice weather which extends for much of the year. So while I've found myself terribly rusty, I've been able to work off some of the kinks and work on my groundstrokes and service game.

What I find interesting is that I still react to unforced errors, or "mis-hits" in the same way that I used to in high school, despite the fact that I'm more than twice as old as I was back in my high school days and my worldview has changed dramatically, between going through the life-altering seasons of marriage and parenthood as well as devoting myself to my Christian faith. But my reaction upon volleying a ball into the net or sailing it ten feet beyond the baseline is still the same. I bend my arms and clench my racket in one hand and fist in the other and scream, "Oh, come on!" out loud to myself. It's sort of silly, but I've done this since I started playing tennis in sixth grade. But it's interesting that I still do this almost twenty years afterwards. One might think that many years of maturity would help me to chill out a little or be it's somehow stuck.

I think there's this conditioned response to frustration that tends to be difficult to break out of. I think the shouting on the tennis court is obviously a specific reaction to a specific type of frustration, but is emblematic of how human beings react to any sort of trial or hardship. And like the shouting during tennis, getting older in of itself doesn't change how we cope with difficulties. As children we threw tantrums, withdrew, blamed others, or whined when things didn't get our way. As adults, we do very much the same things, except that we do so in a way which just seems more grown-up - we may use more advanced vocabulary in our tantrums or whining and we're a little more subtle in our blame deflection.

So God help me - I'm less concerned about me shouting at myself on the tennis court, but I certainly hope that over time my conditioned response to frustrating situations would be increasingly patient, gracious and wise.