Getting off the stage to sit in the audience is not easy. Even less abandon the Olympus of the Gods. Applauding is not the same as receiving applause. The athlete, like every neighbor’s son, knows what inevitably comes upon him with the physical decline of the years. But that knowledge is actually useless until it begins to become tangible in the body. A progressive mental journey that goes from a merely theoretical beginning – one day it will be time to quit – to a very practical end – that day has arrived. This week the law of time has been fulfilled for Rafa Nadal.
We, the people of the 21st century, are subscribers to controversy. So the conversation about the tennis player’s farewell has focused on whether his definitive abandonment of the courts has been up to the level that the myth deserved and deserves. Talk for the sake of talking. There will undoubtedly be tributes tailored to the emperor who leaves Rome to take refuge in Capri. They will be, when they arrive, fair, necessary and comforting for Nadal and also for his followers. But that does not mean that what is substantial has already happened: the culmination of an individual journey of acceptance of goodbye. It’s over. So far. Memento mori.
Nadal’s wish is that the second part of his life is as profitable as the first.
Nadal’s retirement has coincided with the presentation of the book in Barcelona More and more strengths (Albada, 2024. From the English original From strength to strength ) by the American social researcher Arthur Brooks. There is in those pages a source of wise advice to face the second part of life by those who have dedicated the first to rising to the top of the pyramid of recognition and success. Since Nadal has always shown to have his head in the right place, it is very possible that without reading it we can see in it from now on some of the advice that is given there to live even more fully when the permanent applause of others ceases. and the plane of myth touches down on the landing strip of the everyday, normal and common. Someone will say but he is a millionaire! What normality are you talking about? TRUE. It’s just that the pocketbook and giving a minimally transcendent meaning to what one does operate on different levels of reality. The comfort of the soul and the comfort of the wallet do not automatically align.
With each retirement of an elite athlete, of someone who has touched the sky with his fingers, learning begins to escape the shackles of a majestic past in favor of an uncertain future, but which, if well managed, can be even more fulfilling than expected. already experienced. So the best wish for Nadal, in fair compensation for what he has given us, more than any farewell show, is that the second part of his life is as profitable as the first. May the genius of the track become a teacher of life.
#Olympus #Josep #Martí #Blanch
