Common Ground in Table Tennis and Beyond

Common Ground – opinions or interests shared by each of two or more parties 

My original intent in writing this was to come up with some items that everybody can agree on. As I considered some possible subjects that seemed very obvious to me, I realized not everybody will share my opinion on what seems self evident. I don’t get into too many political discussions with my table tennis friends. I’d hate to lose a good training partner or worthy opponent, simply because one of us votes for the candidates with D’s next to their name, and one of us likes the R’s. I don’t see too much evidence of racism at table tennis clubs, but that might not be everyone’s experience. While it’s not a great idea to engage in controversial discussions with your table tennis friends, inevitably people will give you some clues as to how they feel about the world situation. I frequently enjoy the company of those I disagree with the most. But, that might change if we were to talk about our choices for president in the November elections. 

Even with those people that I generally agree with, we will have some issues that we see differently. There’s bound to be some subject on which we won’t find common ground. Let’s face it. There’s a lot to potentially disagree on, even in the relatively calm world of table tennis. I was considering titling this post “Table Tennis Information Overload.” A quick Google search revealed that someone had already written such an article, and it turned out it was me. I hate to repeat myself, but whether you are sorting through table tennis articles or the nightly news, you’ll have to narrow down some of the information to what seems to be the most helpful.  

Everyone will sort out this information differently. Indisputable facts will be shot down by fact checkers, only to be re investigated by other fact checkers, who were fact checking the fact checkers that got it wrong. That’s all according to infallible fact checkers who have been accused of not getting their facts straight. Another group of fact checkers contend that all previous fact checkers were looking at the wrong facts. You’ll probably have a hard time finding common ground if the facts you think are important, are basically inconsequential to somebody else. 

It would be nice if I could have written this and concluded that we all have a lot in common, and we should all be able to find peace through ping pong. The fact is that we’ll need to love each other, despite our inability to have much common ground. That’s according to my favorite fact checker.