Playing in the Rain

I didn't expect anything unusual to happen that day. I was just on a tennis court, doing what I've done hundreds of times before. But then it started to rain — not a drizzle, not an inconvenience, but a full, soaking downpour. And something in me shifted before I had the chance to analyze it or control it.

For the first time in years, I wasn't performing.

I wasn't trying to improve.

I wasn't trying to be the disciplined, ambitious version of myself I've been rehearsing so carefully.

I was just hitting the ball.

And that terrified me with how good it felt.

The strokes weren't textbook. They weren't the ones drilled into me years ago. They weren't optimized for anything. Yet somehow, they were the cleanest, most effortless hits I've made in years — crisp, solid, almost shockingly precise. It was as if the moment I stopped trying to do everything "right," my body remembered how to do everything well.

I didn't realize how long it had been since I felt that alive.

There was a kind of clarity in the rain — a stripping away. Every drop made it harder to pretend I hadn't lost something important along the way. Over time, ambition had turned into pressure, and pressure had turned into a constant performance. I've been chasing perfection so intensely that I didn't notice what I traded for it: joy, spontaneity, the freedom to simply play.

That rainy court exposed the truth I usually outrun:

I've been living like someone who must always justify his existence by improving at something.

But in that moment, drenched and laughing and not caring how ridiculous I looked, I felt the presence of someone I hadn't seen in a long time — the kid I used to be. The kid who played for no reason other than the pleasure of movement. The kid who didn't care about form or progress or who was watching. The kid who didn't think; he just existed.

Somewhere along the way, under deadlines, expectations, bright LED lights, and constant self-optimization, that kid got buried.

And yet in the rain, he climbed back out.

The court became a place between worlds — the life I've been living, shaped by goals and constant improvement, and the life I momentarily touched, shaped by freedom and presence. What startled me wasn't the beauty of that moment but how unfamiliar it felt. How foreign. How much I'd been missing it without realizing it.

When the storm finally forced me off the court, I wasn't thinking about tennis anymore. I was thinking about the cost of always trying to be the best version of myself. I was thinking about how easily a life can become over-managed, over-optimized, and under-lived.

I wasn't playing in the rain.

I was remembering how to live.

That's the part that stays with me — not the strokes, not the drama of the weather, but the realization that joy isn't something you "earn" after the work is done. It's something you have to give yourself permission to feel. I had forgotten that. Maybe I didn't even know it until now.

All I know is this: if a single hour on a wet tennis court can reconnect me to a version of myself I thought I'd lost, then there's something in my life that needs to change. The rain didn't unlock anything new. It just revealed what I'd buried.

And now that I've seen it, I can't pretend I don't miss that kid anymore.