A Love Letter to Tennis

Of all the leisurely pursuits I could have chosen, I picked one that assaults my lungs, tests my dignity, and on bad days challenge my will to live. Yet here I am, chronically devoted to tennis - a game that has torn me down physically, emotionally, and spiritually only to resurrect me so thoroughly that I often leave the court wondering whether I’ve just had a spiritual awakening or a mild brush with mortality. Against all odds, it drags me back to life. I never set out to fall in love with tennis. But somehow, the game found me when I was running from myself, from a weighty silence in the mornings, from the chaos rattling in my head, from the gnawing sense that I was slipping through the cracks of my own existence. Tennis didn’t soothe me, it didn’t ask me to calm down. Instead, it consumed me. It demanded every ounce of focus, every breath, every flicker of hope or frustration i had and pulled them all into the present. In that fire, all the noise I carried burned away. Tennis has a way of seducing you quietly. Not with ease, but with honesty. It doesn’t flatter you. It doesn’t care for your ego. It exposes your weaknesses, your impatience, your refusal to let go of what you cannot control. Yet it also offers something exquisitely rare - a moment of complete, crystalline presence. I’ve learned that the real beauty of the sport isn’t in winning or playing perfectly - it’s in the courage to try, to fail, to try again. The beauty lies in the rawness of the attempt. Tennis, at its core, is an art that blurs the line between punishment and pleasure. It demands your body to move with precision while it forces your mind to shut up. In that collision of motion and stillness, you don’t merely exist, you ignite from within. Your blood thrums, your lungs scream, your muscles tighten, and the clarity that cuts through it all stings like truth you can’t ignore. It’s raw. It’s unflinching. It hurts. And it calls forth every piece of yourself you’ve been hiding from. In this moment - messy, fleeting, alive - you are fully here. Not running, not fading, not lost in thought. Just here. In your body, in your life, anchored by the world and, for the first time in a long time, fully held by yourself. In the end, the court is the only place where I feel wholly myself, stripped of pretense and the relentless weight of expectation. It is here that I can stumble and soar in the same heartbeat, where exhaustion and exhilaration coexist, and the ordinary act of swinging a racket becomes a measure of my own fragility and strength. And that’s why, despite everything, I walk back onto that court again and again, willingly offering myself to the game I love - sore, breathless, humbled, and happier than anywhere else on earth. Tennis may break me, but only in the way profound love does - by demanding everything I have, and in return offering something immeasurably larger than myself. Tennis brings me back to life in a way nothing else quite does. There's a strange, beautiful feeling in living so loudly your that your veins scream you’re alive. You push, you fight, you throw yourself into the chaos and in that fire, you feel it: - the raw, electric pulse of existence. On the court, the world narrows to focus and movement. Off the court, life is the same - messy, relentless, fast, and unexpectedly beautiful if you’re willing to step into it.