At the top

Cultivating stillness is its own kind of game. (Image by Silentpilot)

This week, Ashleigh Barty, the number-one ranked women's tennis player in the world, announced her retirement from the sport at age twenty-five.

It made international headlines. Who quits at the top?

Barty said that she knows all too well what it takes to bring out her best, and she doesn't want to do it anymore. She doesn't have the drive.

I find this intriguing — and understandable. After you've made your dream come true, what's next? You could do it again and again, collecting Grand Slam titles, or you could move on to the next adventure.

The fact is, anyone who has gotten incredibly good at something has had to sacrifice a lot for that. You can't have balance. Instead, you're putting all your money on one horse. It makes sense that you wouldn't want to do that forever. It makes sense that you'd want to try other things and have new experiences.

Though there will be opportunities opening up to Ashleigh Barty as a result of her choice, she's also losing a great deal. She's giving up an identity. That's incredibly destabilizing. If you've done nothing but play one sport obsessively for decades, who are you without it? That's a scary question to face.

Not only is this move a tough one internally, it's likely to trigger criticism from the outside. Doing what everyone expects of you, even if those expectations are very high, is easy. It's the path of least resistance. Changing things up when everything is going well, interrupting the accepted pattern, and going against the expectations of others? Few of us are willing to mess with our reality this way. There is a lot of growth and learning available to those of us who try it, but it comes at a cost. We may lose a sense of belonging that we had come to count on.

It sounds like Ashleigh Barty has done a lot of work on mental resilience and is well prepared for the path she's taking. I don't know her, and her life and choices are none of my business. I wish her nothing but happiness.

In contemplating Barty's announcement, I wonder about my own life. Do I have it in me to devote myself fully to one endeavor? Could I become world class at anything? And if so, what would it be?

On the other hand, would I have the courage to walk away from something I'm dependably great at and step into the unknown?

I don't have the answers to these questions, but I do understand the trap inherent in success. I can see how someone could get wrapped up in perpetual pursuit of greatness. No matter how much you achieve, you could always achieve more; that is a recipe for misery just as much as it's a path to victory.

But being wary of success is a trap, too. If I'm afraid of getting stuck in a cycle of striving, I might decide that I don't even want to try. And that may keep me safe and comfortable, but it doesn't help me to reach my potential. It doesn't serve anyone else, either.

As with so many things, growth comes from doing the part that we're not good at yet, that we haven't done before. For Ashleigh Barty, that means saying no to tennis and saying yes to whatever is beyond that.

For me, it means saying yes to some things that I haven't mastered yet. It means investing effort and stretching myself and trying stuff that might not work.

Maybe someday I'll get to the point where I can let go of the things I’ve spent my life pursuing, having reached the pinnacle of accomplishment. But not yet. First, I have to do the work to become great. Then, if I should ever arrive at the top, I can decide whether I want to do the hard work to stay there. What we can learn from the most accomplished people in the world is that letting go might be just as hard, and that might be reason in itself to do it.