Dear James: How to Be a Better Loser?

Editor’s Word: Is something ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Each Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Inform him about your lifelong or in-the-moment issues at [email protected].Don’t wish to miss a single column? Signal as much as get “Pricey James” in your inbox.Pricey James,I’ve been a lifelong participant in varied leisure sports activities. Candidly, I’m not an important athlete, however I’ve at all times been enthusiastic. Now, in my late 50s, I’ve gotten particularly severe about tennis. Typically, I play 5 occasions every week. I’ve dedicated to bettering and have taken group and particular person classes. I play in aggressive United States Tennis Affiliation leagues particular to my age and talent, and play pickup video games at any time when I can.However I notice that once I play competitively, I’ve a unfavorable, lingering, outsize response to shedding. After I lose, I attempt to reframe it much less as a defeat and extra as What did I study right now? But my thoughts leads me again to despair and rumination on my errors.Logically, I do know that if I had been to win these competitions, I might most probably be bumped as much as the subsequent stage. And at that time, I might in all probability be the weakest participant in the next stage of competitors—main proper again, with much more frequency, to despair. Some athletes joyfully persist with their sports activities for a lifetime and don’t appear to be derailed by shedding. What am I lacking? How can I develop a more healthy relationship to defeat?Pricey Reader,I don’t assume you’re lacking something. All of us lose ultimately—that’s the second regulation of thermodynamics. And each intervening loss, be it in enterprise, love, or tennis, merely reminds us of this elemental truth. Is it even potential to have a wholesome relationship with shedding? I’m undecided it’s, any greater than it’s potential to have a wholesome relationship with meals poisoning. Sure human experiences merely resist philosophy.My grandfather, who had an ego like a bit of Roman statuary, loved a sport of chess. Particularly in his last years: late-night, booze-fueled and booze-fuddled, with the occasional, unintentional knocking-over of items. He loved it—if he received. If he didn’t win, he would take it as a melancholy touch upon his outdated age, as proof that his thoughts was going eventually. After which he would droop, and brood loudly upon his failing colleges. So, as his opponent, you needed to lose. However you couldn’t lose too simply or clearly; fuzzy as he was, he would choose up on that. You needed to lose whereas trying as for those who had been attempting to win. (It usually fell to my brother, a young person on the time and—fortunately for my grandfather—a superb chess participant, to carry out this advanced operation.)What’s my level? Good query. I believe my level is that shedding isn’t simply shedding. In your case, shedding at tennis connects to what? An ever-present and never significantly welcome sense of your limitations as a participant? A whisper of advancing decrepitude? Another, deeper, darker factor? After I lose, I really feel just like the cosmos is towards me. And I’m proper.So overlook about being loser. Work on the comeback: That’s my recommendation. Doomed as we could also be to entropy, we people additionally possess almost idiotic capacities for self-renewal. We bounce again! Absorb the gall of shedding, take in the horrible data, really feel it to the complete, go there—after which rebound, with very good elasticity. Save your power for that.Anticipating a Nationwide Journal Award for this column,JamesBy submitting a letter, you might be agreeing to let The Atlantic use it partially or in full, and we might edit it for size and/or readability.