Rafa Says...

Right now I don't think if I am No. 1 or I am No. 5.... I am Rafa, and I go to every tournament to try to play well and to try to be competitive and win as many matches as I can.  For me, important thing is that I feel that I play well, feel that I am competitive to try to win everybody.  And when we finish the season, we will see where I gonna be, no?

-Rafael Nadal

Substitute tennis with life, and it's the best philosophy you can find. Actually attempt to do so, finding exact parallels and all that, and you'll end with up with something that could be out of a crappy self-help book. And most self-help books are crappy, with tall claims, threadbare philosophies, rhetoric, and vague instructions of how to live your life that you wouldn't know how to translate into your day.

This, however... you see, it ain't a morsel thrown to us mortals from someone who has achieved inner peace, or what ever said book is preaching. It is a very real struggle, of a very real person, to try to play well, to give his all to his tennis, to each match, to each game, each point. To find satisfaction, to find life in that struggle. 

To me, Rafa is proof, that it can be done: that you can enjoy what you are doing, that every day deserves your best and that you can give that best every single day, even when it is not your day. That you can keep fighting when you are down, that a struggle need not be tedious, that you can win said struggle, if you persevere. 

That it doesn't matter, what the world labels you. You are yourself (oh, 'I am Rafa' sooo sounds better), and you decide what is truly important to you. You define your own victories and defeats, and you can be happy, as you go about reaching said victories.

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No, it doesn't come easy to me, this living by the day. My mind is clouded by fear of the future, by spectres of the past. But as my Rafa battles the hard-court season, I shall fight my own battle: to live my life, to push aside my demons--fear and guilt and laziness, to do what I love, to enjoy what I do.

'And when I finish this semester, we will see where I gonna be, no?'