Performance
Cricketer Yuvraj Singh recounts elite competition, cancer diagnosis, treatment abroad, family support, rehabilitation, and his return to India’s team.
If you never asked why you were chosen when good luck came, you have no standing to ask it when bad luck comes. The author used this symmetry to refuse self-pity after his cancer diagnosis, pointing out that he had taken every win without questioning his fortune.
People readily share their triumphs, but the author argues they should share their suffering just as openly. Hearing someone else's grief tells a person in trouble that they are not alone.
A high-stakes goal can make a person put off listening to their body, treating warning signs as something to deal with later. The author looked back and asked whether it had been foolish to skip the doctor for a tournament. A reviewer describes him ignoring symptoms for almost a year.
Growing up around frightening fights between adults can teach a child to clamp down on their own anger. The author learned to control his temper by living through his parents' conflicts. He states the rule as: govern anger before it governs you.
A child raised to fulfil a parent's dream can feel, even as a teenager, that the life they are living belongs to someone else. The author describes chasing his father's goals rather than his own.
The presence of a close friend can free the mind even when the body is at its weakest. The author describes looking bloated, bald and feeble during treatment, yet feeling his mind was free on the day a friend came to visit.
During treatment, staying attached to your old achievements can get in the way of healing. The author received the advice to stop replaying his own matches and focus on his health, on the view that the sport would come back to him. In this account, the return is something you trust will follow, not something you chase while sick.
The author treats survival as a second chance that he means to spend running, and he expects to fall again. Planning to get up after each fall, rather than hoping never to fall, is his model of a comeback.
The first collapse after bad news may come less from fear of what the disease will do and more from mourning the ordinary life that is now gone. The author cried not out of dread of cancer but because he wanted his life to stay normal, and knew it could not.
Treating a performance as a debt owed to someone who shaped you can give the effort more weight than personal ambition does. The author describes the advice to dedicate a whole tournament to a person you love or owe, so that playing well becomes a way of paying them back.