Great Expectations

It's funny that you define a goal, see a possibility, aim for it, reach it...and immediately, it seems, become dissatisfied with it. What looked from a distance to be enough turns out, on closer inspection, not to be enough at all, just a point on the way to getting somewhere that is still just out of reach.

I'm partly thinking about the tennis, of course. As Dustin Brown is quoted as saying in the paper today: "When I came to quallies, if someone would have said 'sign here for beating Rafa, making the second round and qualifying' I would have signed". But now, of course, it's not enough, because once he beat Rafa to go through to the third round he could see himself going through there, too, and suddenly it's not what he acheived that he can see, but that shining next round that he missed. I suspect Heather Watson and James Ward feel the same. They acheived more than they could have hoped for and all it does is hold out the possibility of more, and the disappointment of the failure to reach that.

Even when you do reach those shining Elysian fields and win a Grand Slam, or two, it's still not enough, because you want to do that again, and again.

It may be that this is because tennis is a competitive game, so that part of the point is always to be better than the person on the other side of the net. Part of it is perhaps the rewards. When you normally earn slightly less than it costs you to get to the tournament it must be such a relief to win a couple of year's salary in one week. And the better you do the easier it it to get into other tournaments: no need to qualify if your world ranking gets you straight in, and hopefully you'll be playing players ranked below you. Yes, life must become easier in all sorts of ways.

And yet. And yet there are players who slog away at minor tournaments, clambering through qualfiying rounds, hoping for wild cards, who in a career spanning years never make it past the first week of a grand slam. If it was fame or money or an easy life they were after they could have found easier ways of achieving those.

At the end of the day they must surely play because it is what they want to do, what they enjoy doing. And it is for themselves that somehow their best is never good enough, and acheiving something new is only a tantalising glimpse of more that might be possible if only they push on, one more time. It is, I think, a lot like playing music. Somehow there is always more to be achieved, more you could do, another round you could get to.