There’s a guy from Los Angeles who messaged me on a tennis app this week.
He was coming to Orlando for a trade show and figured he’d try to find someone to hit with. His wife told him it would never work. He sent the message anyway.
I responded in ten minutes. We played Wednesday night.
This isn’t a remarkable story. A stranger found another stranger through an app, they played tennis, it was a good night. Happens all the time in other contexts.
Except it doesn’t happen all the time in tennis. Tennis is a sport where most people guard their courts, their partners, their time. The default is exclusivity, not openness.
I’ve been thinking about why I responded so fast. Not strategically. Not because I had a reason to. Just — because someone asked, and I had something to give.
After cancer, I spent a long time operating in scarcity mode. Not with money — with energy. With capacity. With the sense that I only had so much of myself left and I had to be careful about where it went.
That’s not wrong in the rebuilding phase. You protect the resource when the resource is limited.
But somewhere along the way — through the rituals, the body work, the relationships rebuilt — the scarcity stopped. The cup started refilling faster than I was emptying it.
And when the cup is full, you give differently.
You don’t calculate. You don’t ration. You respond to a stranger on a tennis app in ten minutes because why wouldn’t you? You have something to give and he needs someone to play with.
I think about this in the context of what cancer takes from you.
It takes your health, obviously. Your timeline. Some of your confidence in the future. But what it takes that nobody talks about is your sense of abundance. Your willingness to be open to things. Your ability to say yes without doing a cost-benefit analysis first.
Recovery isn’t just physical. It’s restoring the abundance mindset. Rebuilding the belief that you have enough — of yourself, your time, your energy — to give some of it away without losing something essential.
I didn’t know I was missing it until it came back.
The guy from LA had a great night. Weather was perfect. Tennis was light and fun. He texted me after to say thank you.
His wife was wrong.
Not because the tennis app thing worked — it worked because someone on the other end had something to give and chose to give it.
That’s the whole thing. That’s the return on all the work.
Not the score. Not the job. Not the relationship, even.
The return on the work is waking up one morning and realizing you have more than you need — and responding to strangers in ten minutes because of it.
Just. Keep. Moving.