Satya

“WELL, WHICH IS IT? WERE YOU IN OR OUT OF THE KITCHEN?” Uncle Paul is hitching across the pickleball court with his questions. On our side of the net, my partner Catherine stands in front of me, her face open and inquiring, her eyes kindly searching mine.

I’ve already sideways whispered to Catherine that I was in the kitchen, the section of the pickleball court seven feet from both sides of the net, with rules for egress and returning the ball that everyone ignores. Until they don’t. “In,” means we lose the point, that I stepped into the kitchen to hit the ball in the air, before it bounced. “Are you going to tell them?” Catherine whispers back.

My hands, one holding my paddle, hang limply at my sides. Nerves zap inside my head, like volleys at close range, an anxiety of learned impulses and unresolved emotions. I’m seven years old, standing behind my beloved handsome father at the check-out counter in the dark little grocery store, where he’s confused the young cashier into giving me my allowance, leaving both of us bewildered. I’m seventeen and hunched over my desk in physics, sneaking peeks at test answers written on my palm, which my mother stole while substitute teaching, fretting the number of right answers I need to pass and placate Mom.

Dad taught me work arounds and obfuscation to gain the upper hand; Mom flat-out taught me to cheat. That’s been my justification for calling balls out when they’re on the line, to improve my chances of winning. Just like in junior high, when I earned a tennis trophy solely through my ability to convincingly fudge scores. But today, my first impulse is to tell the truth, though the countermand is strong.

Maybe fifteen seconds have passed.

“IN. I was in the kitchen, damn it!”

“Ok, then, good,” Catherine nods, without judgement.

“What took you so long?” my uncle asks, laughing.

“Well, I am my father’s daughter,” I joke back. Uncle Paul nods, knowing his brother as he does. Really, though, I meant: I am my parents’ daughter.

Then, a lightness inside my chest, a lifting in my brain. An unburdening.

Satya, I think to myself. Truthfulness.

***

Toward the end of 2020, Uncle Paul takes me to a pickleball court to bat balls around. No masks, as we’re outdoors. No rules, scoring, technique. Just whacking the holey yellow ball back and forth. “I feel like I’m living my best life!” I whoop, in shorts and a t-shirt on a sunny December morning, moving my body in liberating new ways. New is what I need, as 2019 was the shits.

After nearly a lifetime of dedication to a family by turns funny, helpful, and mean, the great pile-up began. Five years of emotionally conflicted caretaking before Mom’s passing; an alcoholic husband, divorce, and his ongoing harassment; Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and decline; a mysterious illness and its equally mysterious resolution; and the sudden death of my cat. One night, overwhelmed by grief, anxiety, guilt, shame, and loneliness, I had a breakdown.

Soon after, I retreated to the high desert of northern Arizona. To the old squatty house where I lived with Gram in the 1970s after my parents’ divorce; Uncle Paul lives up the street. Embraced by rugged crimson mountains, and in kinship with the red dirt on which I plant my hiking boots in daily communion, I’m alone, but rarely lonely.

Depleted and seeking to untangle the much-repeated patterns that contributed to my undoing, I began studying the Yamas while taking yoga teaching-training. The Yamas, along with the Niyamas, are the first limb on the Yoga Sutras’ eight-fold path. I haven’t, and may never, get beyond the five Yamas, known in the sutras as “restraints” or “ethical disciplines.” Because in the Yamas I recognize how I’ve been living, trapped in cycles of self-hatred, fear, mistrust, lies, possessiveness, and self-indulgence. And through the Yamas, I’ve been learning how to responsibly behave, think, and feel my way into becoming the person I’d rather be; a person of my own making.

Satya, “truthfulness,” the second Yama, is partner to the first Yama, Ahimsa, “non-violence.” They are fundamental. My first Satya experience was of emotional liberation. Of waking up to my true self. While practicing, of all things, pickleball.                               

***

After some sleuthing I find a beginner/intermediate pickleball group. Just across the highway at the foot of the mountains. My skill level is zero. It’s February, 2021. I open the gate and walk onto the fenced-in courts.

A fit young woman with dark curly hair seizes my gaze: “Hello!” she calls out. Shira is Israeli and from Oakland, where she has a dance company. She lives in her van, next to the Airbnbs she buys and renovates. She starts teaching me how to serve. Shira is prone to doing handstands on the court, lifts her paddle in a two-handed dinking move I dub “The Shira,” and outplays us all within two weeks. My girl crush, definitely.

Others invite me onto the court. I can’t serve, return a serve, keep score; don’t know when to move up or stay back; and hold my paddle incorrectly. It doesn’t matter. Pat’s also a beginner. Sturdy with a gap-tooth smile, Pat’s thick gray ponytail bobs as she plays, and her broad well-creased face goes blank with surprise when she executes a low fast serve. She supervised men at a GM factory, has tattoos commemorating lost grandsons on her wrists, has been married four times, and throws her paddle when pissed.

Pat’s negative on herself, like me, so I yell out, “Yeah, baby, nice shot!” when she drives the ball down the middle. She sends me links to pickleball teaching videos. We lunch on avocado toast and share our stories; visit artist studios and buy paintings; discuss who’s misbehaving. We’ve got each other’s backs.

Mark, whom I re-name Marky Mark, never wears a hat, has curly gray hair and self-described “chicken legs,” and volunteers for nearly every nonprofit in town. He puts spin on the ball with a flick of his wrist. It’s brutal when it works. He’s brutally hard on himself when it doesn’t, quickly de-evolving into an Eeyore-like sulk that only a win will shake. He and Pat invite me to their Friday night get-togethers at “the pit,” a water collection basin at the edge of a trailhead that’s nearly always dry; I gladly accept, giddy at the sense of belonging.

John’s left side is compromised; he has a deep limp, and a hand of little use encased in a clear plastic glove. He serves and hits with his right, is hard to beat, and is always encouraging—with a side of snark. Catherine is ex-military and her husband Wayne is an accountant and an actor; they summer on Bainbridge Island, where pickleball was invented, and play five times a week. Kevin is extremely tall and a banger, meaning, while trash talking no less, he fiercely slams the ball down the court. He threatens to duct-tape my right arm to my side so I stop flailing and hit my returns. He brings home-grown vegetables for us.

They dub me the Cursing Queen, as I swear with the ferocity of Kevin’s banger shots. Whether to deflect from my inadequacies or because I’m having so much fun, I’m a goofball. After one surprisingly good return, I proclaim to Jeff, a retired physician who bakes exquisite macaroons, “I’m the Queen of the court!” When I miss the next shot, he yells back, “You’ve been deposed!” and we laugh ourselves delirious. Marky Mark dubs the score 2-2-2 “The Camille,” because I spin on my tip-toes holding my paddle in a port de bras, singing “tutututu” before serving. I fling myself into a return so hard my paddle flies out of my hand; skid across the court on my hands and knees (“Was the ball in?!”); fall facedown into the net like a well-landed fish.

We play on a tennis court with four pickleball courts outlined in formerly red tape worn white. Our courts are scored with mini-trenches that cause the ball, on landing, to skew any which way; with scrapes that snag shoe bottoms; with patches where one layer of the court has separated from the others, ballooning up like some sci-fi protuberance. We set up our portable nets on these worn surfaces. We’re scrappy, competitive, and playful.

We play by a code, similar to the Yamas’, of responsibility to self and community: Help assemble and take down the nets. Retrieve balls you loft over the fence. Let waiting players get onto the court next. Drink water. Never say you’re sorry. That last one is the hardest.

***

“You’re so good at saying you’re sorry,” a friend once said. “Because I’m always fucking up,” I replied. Readily apologizing backpedals whatever faux pas I’ve just made. “I’m sorry” acknowledges my wrong, diffuses situations, smooths interpersonal relations. “I’m sorry.” Period. Hard stop. It works.

At sixty-one, learning a new sport with a new group of people, “sorry” is automatic. It’s also annoying. “There’s no sorry in pickleball,” players repeat. “Just get the ball over the net and the rest will come.” The third Yama, Asteya or “non-stealing,” counsels that sorry shines a spotlight on incompetence and shows a lack of care toward oneself—and by extension, others. In pickleball, as in life, that will not do.

Asteya advises me to build adikara: To cultivate the skills and abilities needed to achieve a desired outcome, whether to live a more compassionate life or play better pickleball. Through the practice of adikara, I learn kindness by laughing at my mistakes, or by analyzing them to try better next time. I stop saying sorry. Instead, I lift up myself and other players by being positive, complementary. By practicing Ahimsa.

It’s a latticework of loosenings and re-learnings, these intertwined practices: the Yamas and pickleball. Enough to break my head at times.

***

Satya is compactly interwoven with instruction. Earning truthfulness requires a methodical, and unflinching, examination of learned behaviors I’ve continued in adulthood because the chaos they produce is familiar. Most confusing is that Satya asks that I differentiate between “nice” and “real.” For me, nice is silence; anger, anxiety, and wrongness swallowed with a smile. After decades of dedication to familial expectation, of acquiescing to the normalization of disregard, real confounds me. Until I get to know Jen.

Jen is a former badminton coach, which I find hilarious and formidable. She’s a sparkplug who donated her thick gray braids to Locks of Love and now sports a mod asymmetrical bob. She arrives at pickleball in neon-bright or holiday-themed outfits. She’s the keeper of the extra nets. She collects our dues. She’s the boss of us and readily admits she’s a bitch. She’s not nice, she’s real.

“Keep an eye on that guy,” she orders. “He’s always in the kitchen.” I laugh.

“Jen! I can’t even tell if I’m in the kitchen. Plus, I can barely keep my eye on the ball, and on the lines, much less on where that dude is standing!”

“Yeah, yeah, ok,” Jen says. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll watch him.”

Real is speaking what is true. No one does this better than Jen.

The Yamas teach that compassion cultivated through Ahimsa keeps realness from becoming a personal weapon. That in the moment, as we’re facing the ordinariness and challenges of life, real may not be pleasant, but it’s trustworthy. Again, my head breaks. Because my real can be awfully pissy. Which the Oxford defines as “arrogantly argumentative.” Which describes my mood exactly when people—usually former tennis players, from out of town—serve low, fast, spinning balls that land just at the serving line, or slam the ball at 50 mph across the court. Ok, I reason with myself, I’ll learn something. But sometimes I erupt, in anger or fear.

“That really pisses me off! This is pickleball, not tennis,” I scream.

“Well, you don’t have to play with me,” one visitor retorted.

Touché. Real is honest, the Yamas say, and truth can be fluid.

I decide to play only with my regulars, the ones who keep pickleball competitive and fun. I stop apologizing for missing serves that are too hard, low, and wicked fast; for hanging out in “no man’s land” instead of at the serve or kitchen line; for hitting the ball too hard or too soft. I learn to keep score, adjust my serve to go long or short, whack the ball down the middle, volley and rally, and lob a return to the line. Adikara brings me to a singular sort of joy.

Calling out the score in a deep sure voice, dancing my little cat step to prepare my serve, I’m calm, confident. I own my focus, accomplishment. I tuck in my core, take a breath, rock back, and deliver the ball, ready for the return as I exhale. Hopeful, expectant, ready to play.

***

We have a nemesis. Chris. A hanger on. A self-appointed “coach” dispensing advice where it’s not welcome. Who stands too close and is too intense, spitting between his big teeth as he mansplains how to hold a paddle, deliver a serve, choose a ball, return a dink, stand on the court. He often disses Pat, who dishes back better than she gets. He has a rap sheet of complaints against him, but can’t be banned. We tried. Most of us not only refuse to play with Chris, we ignore him.

One morning, Chris yells and points at me, from the far court, so all can hear: “Everyone is improving except you!”

“What?!” I screech.

“Hey, that’s not nice, and it’s not even true,” Jeff yells back. Other players refute the asshole in my defense, for which I’m grateful. But I’m still reactive, easy to get a rise out of, grumbly as friends gather around, murmuring disapprovals.

Ignore him, I tell myself, invoking the fifth Yama, Aparigraha, “non-attachment.” He’s not real, just mean: A playground bully, who was probably bullied himself. I’m no longer vulnerable, or helpless. I breathe in and breath out. Let it go.

***

“Stop! Look up!” Eri calls out, her paddle lifted. Eri is a Japanese healer. She leads visitors from her country on transformational journeys through the red rocks, massages our injuries, and grabs my hand insisting “You must play” when I’m sad.

Now she’s pointing her phone skyward. Sundogs. Yellow, purple, and blue haloing an amorphous gray cloud in the otherwise cerulean sky, above the red-rock mountains carved by wind, water, and time into surreal behemoths surrounding our courts. That I give up several days of hiking every week to play pickleball speaks to how much I value my new friends and what they’re teaching me.

Including Brahmacharya, the fourth Yama, “non-excess.” To remember nature’s divinity even during sweaty competition, during play. To willingly break off from the quotidian task at hand, or the breath-holding excitement of a volley, and recognize the privileges we enjoy here: Home, friendship, a spectacular landscape, and nature’s propensity to surprise.

***

The Yamas hold the self that was and is, and inspire the self I’m becoming. They’re a practice, like pickleball, with which I’ve become intertwined. I’m alive, the Yamas counsel, to express myself in a way no one else ever has or ever will, while embracing my imperfections, learning from my missteps, and opening myself to joy.

It’s May, already hot-hot, and players are dispersing for summer homes elsewhere. I’m heading north to spend time with Dad, now in memory care. “When are you coming back?” my friends ask, amid hugs and tears. “Call anytime you need anything, or just to talk,” they offer. “I’ll be pestering you at least once a week, bitch,” Pat adds, with a tight embrace. I nod good-bye to Chris, who is cordial, if only for a moment.

Marky Mark, Pat, and I grab our bags and walk to the gate, hip to hip, shoulders nudging playfully.

“Take some lessons!” Chris yells. To me.

We keep walking, don’t look back, and laugh out loud, our faces turned to each other.

“What an asshole,” mutter Pat and Mark.

He couldn’t just leave it at good-bye, I think to myself. What an insecure son-of-a-bitch.

I take the clean mountain air deep into my lungs and luxuriate in the exhale, as my inner voice purrs:

Fuck you, Chris. I already have.