Page 47 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

CHAPTER 5

THE SOFT ZONE

“Lose Yourself”

World Junior Chess Championship Calicut, India November 1993

I was sixteen years old, sitting at a chessboard in Calicut, India. Sweat dripped down
my sides as I battled to stay focused in the sweltering heat. The sun was high, the air
still, the room stuffed with rustling world-class thinkers. I had traveled from New York

City to represent America in the World Championship for chess players under the age of
twenty-one. Each country sent its national champion to compete in a grueling two-week
marathon of pure concentration, endurance, calculation, strategy—a ll-out psychological
war. My father and I had flown into Bombay a week earlier and had traveled south to

the event, where I met my girlfriend, who was representing Slovenia in the women’s
division of the tournament. She was a brilliant girl, gorgeous, otherworldly, fiercely
intense, moody, my first love. Tormented love and war, a complicated mix. Less than
ideal for World Championship competition, but the life of a top chess player is a strange

one. Brutal competition mixes with intense friendships. Players try to destroy their
opponents, to ruin their lives, and then they reflect on the battle, lick their wounds, cull
the lessons, a nd take a walk.
From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who

knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to
excellence and growth so relentlessly. Sitting at a chessboard, just feet away from the
other, you can hear every breath, feel each quiver, sense any flicker of fear or exhilaration.
Hours pass with your entire being tapping into your opponent’s psyche, while the other

follows your thoughts like a shadow and yearns for your demise. Brilliant minds all
around the world devote themselves to the intense study of this mysterious, brutal
intellectual sport, a nd then the best of them collide in distant outposts.