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“Ultimately,” I wrote in the first of the series, “fitness and health are related to everything we do, think and feel. Thus . . . what we are calling Ultimate Fitness has less to do with running a 2:30 marathon than with living a good life.”
mastery, “the mysterious process during which what is at first difficult becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice.”
The purpose of the feature was to describe the path that best led to mastery, not just in sports but in all of life, and to warn against the prevailing bottom-line mentality that puts quick, easy results ahead of long-term dedication to the journey itself.
If there is any sure route to success and fulfillment in life, it is to be found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery. This is true, it appears, in personal as well as professional life, in economics as well as ice skating, in medicine as well as martial arts.
At the same time, the pleasures of practice are intensified. The mat,
I often tell my students, is the world, but it is the world under a magnifying glass.
Still, you learned an essential skill. What’s more important, you learned about learning. You started with
something difficult and made it easy and pleasurable through instruction and practice. You took a master’s journey. And if you could learn to touch your forehead, you can learn to play a Beethoven sonata or fly a jet plane, to be a better manager or improve your relationships. Our current society works in many ways to lead us astray, but the path of mastery is always there, waiting for us.
