There is a pickleball tournament in my hometown of Bartlesville, OK this weekend. Over 200 players are here to play pickleball. But that is not all.

We also catch up on our lives, share pictures of children and grandchildren, discuss knee injuries and joint pain, experience the thrill of victory and the lessons of defeat, and all of this happening in a facility with ten courts and viewing space for fans and players roughly the size of a small coffee shop.

Proximity and presence, flesh and blood, real encounters, handshakes, hugs, laughter, sometimes tears…this is the real reason we play, beyond the stated reason of exercise and competition. We live in a time of division, of political bifurcation, and yet here we are in the coffee shop of our sport rubbing shoulders and most importantly, just being together in a time when most people don’t want to be with other people.

There is a certain vanity to why we play pickleball. It is the vanity of gold medals and posting our victories on Facebook. But there is also a collective humility about a game that is easy to learn but impossible to master. Neil King writes about humility in his book, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal. It is his account of a saunter from his Washington, D.C. home to Manhattan and an ode to the power and value of place:

I had gone out and walked a decent slice of the country through much of a spring and had come away greatly enriched, only to find that the single block I lived on contained depths and mysteries I would never plumb. People have lived lives in my own house that I know nothing about. I could devote a lifetime of study to my lone block and then perhaps, just maybe, do it partial justice. What the land had looked like before the plows and shovels came. The story of each house’s origin. What if you sat in the front garden for days on end just watching the neighbors come and go? Or invited each to dinner, week after week?

My one solid conclusion was we should approach our own certitudes with caution. The more you look, the more you think and study, the more you open other doors and the more you understand how little you know. “If you should ask me about the ways of God,” St. Augustine [of Canterbury] wrote, “I would tell you that the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility. Not that there are no other precepts to give, but if humility does not precede all that we do, our efforts are fruitless.”

This more than medals and accolades is why I play pickleball. Perhaps it is why we live and love and mill about our coffee shop space watching our friends play, cheering, encouraging, realizing how little we know about most people, but perhaps we are learning.

I hope everyone can find a place where you can wonder what the land looked like before you came to it, before the plows and shovels came, to watch people come and go and play a simple sport, and maybe, just maybe, invite them to dinner.