Page 193 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

AFTERWORD

Two years after the madness of that World Cham pi ons hi p in Taiwan, I am still
digesting the experience. Never in my life have I had to di g so de epl y int o

myself. Not even close. It was thrilling and also a bit alienating. I saw pa rts of
myself I didn’t know about. To survive and win, I becam e a gl adiator, pur e and
simple. I hadn’t fully understood that he was inside of me, waiting, but sur ely
all the work I had done for years had made him po ssibl e, p erhap s ine vitabl e.
How did this new part of myself relate to the Josh I’d kno wn my who le life,

the kid who was once scared of the dar k, the chess player, the young man who
loves the rain and re-reading passages of Jack Kerouac? How did it fi in with
my passion for Buddhism and the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi ? Hone stly,

these are questions that I am still sorting out . Do I want to expl ore more of thi s
side of myself? Maybe. But perhaps in a different gui se. Mainly wha t I felt after
Taiwan was an urgent desire to get back to pr actice and shak e off the ide a tha t I
had climbed my mountain. In the last two years I have started over. A ne w
beginning. T here are great adventur es ahead.

*

The writing off this book has spanned an intense and unl ikel y stretch of years.
As a kid growing up, in my tiny room I coul d nev er hav e dreamed tha t suc h
battles awaited me. While writing thes e pages, my ideas hav e evolved, loves
have fallen apart and come anew, world cham pi ons hi ps were lost and won. If I
have learned anything over my fi st twenty-ni ne years, it is tha t we canno t

calculate our important contests, adventur es, and great loves to the end. The
only thing we can really count on is get ting sur pr ised. No matter ho w muc h
preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unf amiliar terrain.

Conditions might not be calm or reasonab le. It may feel as tho ugh the who le
world is stacked against us. This is when we have to per form be tter tha n we
ever conceived of performing. I bel ieve the key is to have pr epared in a manne r