The lob is the future

It seems fitting, at the beginning of a new year, to put some thought into the future: what’s working in our life and what isn’t, what we’d like to start or stop doing, how we want the next twelve months to look. Granted, we only have so much power over things, as many a therapist has pointed out to meover the years, with varying levels of frustration.

“Can you predict the future?” asked one, in response to my paralyzing worry at the time. It felt like a trick question. I knew the correct answer was no, but if I admitted I could not control the future, then what was I doing in a therapist’s office to begin with? Wasn’t I there to alter the course of my life?

According to everyone I know and lots of people who write books on the subject, it’s human nature to always be peering over the wall, gunning for a glimpse of our tomorrows in case there’s something coming we need to avoid, like a wet toilet seat, for example, or meatloaf.

I recently discovered the Pixies’s beautiful rendition of Que Sera Sera,” which was originally sung by Doris Day to the young actor playing her son in Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The entire point of the song, in which achild asks a series of questions about the future, (“Will I be handsome, will I be rich…?) is that it’s impossible to knowwhat’s in store. It’s a harsh truth when you’re an adult, harsher still when you’re a child. Would it have killed Doris to just say “yes to all, and let him realize the scope of her lie later on, when he was equipped to deal with reality?

And then there’s the credo, “One day at a time,” so useful (also: maddening) for reminding us that we do not live in blocks of months or years, but minute to minute, and that it is the collection of minutes lived fully and intentionally that makes for well-lived days and, if we are lucky, futures.

Lastly, there’s my pickleball coach, who, in attempting to elevate my peers and me to more accomplished levels of play, reminds us to keep our paddles up and our opponents back, and when we can, to play high and deep.

“The lob is the future,” he says, in a voice that sounds somehow portentous.  

I know he means the that the lob—the shot that sends the ball sailing high over our opponents’ heads to land at the back of the court—is the future of pickleball, not the future of, say, technology or medical intervention.

But every time I hear it, I feel the message is bigger than pickleball, like theres something cryptic imbedded in it, something so vital to our collective future that, had the late David Foster Wallace, literary master of observation and analysis, been writing today, he’d have changed the title of his seminal essay, “Consider the Lobster,” to “Consider the Lob”—and then ruminated about the shot in his trademark fanatical manner.

But I’m not Wallace, and I can only make random stabs at what the message might be. Maybe it’s something about how we’re to conduct our lives. Maybe it means we should aim high and go deep. Really, I can’t be certain how to decipher “The lob is the future” when the only context I have for this curious proclamation is inside a tennis outbuilding where six women of a certain age wearing a mix of jewelry and athleisure are scrambling for control of a whiffle ball.

There are all manner of life lessons hiding out inside sports metaphors. Just last month in this space, I myself delved deeply into corn hole, the game whose object is to toss a bean bag into a hole in a slanted board, and which speaks volumes (I suggested) about the profound meditative power of humble, even seemingly pointless, undertakings.

I suppose it’s ok to not know what “the lob is the future” means in the scope of life. This way, I remain open to all the non-pickleball possibilities inherent in the message. In fact, when I consider the lob, I see it’s the mystery that makes the shot: the unexpected arc of a ball soaring overhead, that keeps us literally on our toes.

Any other shot could be the future, I suppose, but where’s the poetry in “the dink is the future” or “the drive is the future”? They just don’t resonate. More importantly, there’s no loftymandate to aim for the stars.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. More at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].