My husband and I bought ourselves a red Ping Pong table last December. We put it in his upstairs office, which is the only place it can fit. Since buying our house, we’d gone back and forth on what kind of sitting area to create in front of his desk but could never decide. When we saw the ping pong table, we knew the problem wasn’t indecision. The problem was we didn’t want to sit.

We play ping pong sometimes in the evenings after dinner, but mainly we play in stolen moments between working and working, like when I walk down the short hallway from my office to his to let the dogs out, or when he calls me in to ask a question about something he’s doing. Dogs let out, question answered, we pick up our paddles and a ferocious volley explodes. We play until we are ready to get back to work, or lose three balls to the staircase, whichever comes first. Usually, it’s not more than about ten minutes. But it does the trick. We return to our work more focused. The dogs return to their happy places under my desk and in the big red chair in the corner of my office. And that’s that until we do it again, maybe in two hours, maybe not until the next day.

It’s no secret that my husband and I struggle with balance. We tend to overwork, though we tell ourselves it’s just because we love what we do. And we do!  But even too much of a good thing can be too much, we remind ourselves. Years ago, my writing mentor, upon hearing that I was laboring all day and then again after dinner on a writing project, exclaimed, “Stop sitting on your manuscript!” She was trying to tell me that projects, like people, need space to breathe. Which reminded me that I also needed to breathe.

To not work all the time, my husband and I have thrown ourselves into other activities in addition to the pop-up ping pong rallies. He plays golf two or three days a week. I play pickleball five mornings a week. I tell myself that while it’s true too much of a good thing can be too much, the rule doesn’t apply to golf or pickleball. I tell myself the fact that my right elbow sizzles with pain and I had to have surgery on my right hand is somehow unrelated to my playing a paddle sport ten hours a week. Admittedly, when my doctor heard the five-days-a-week pickleball statistic, she, like my writing mentor years ago, was aghast.

“Can’t you find something else to do a few mornings a week?” she asked. I could write more, I thought, but then I didn’t want to get back to sitting on my manuscript, so really, the answer was no.

Secretly, I think it’s a positive thing that I like what I do enough to cause myself to need surgery and interventions from alarmed others. Perhaps it’s because I can remember plenty of years that I cried on my way to work every morning because I was so unhappy, and years when I moved my body in healthy ways only in service to losing a staggeringly unhealthy number of pounds. Those days make the imbalance in my current life look a lot like balance.

Recently my husband and I started reading Arthur C. Brook’s book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. It’s all about embracing the inevitable, age-related changes in our abilities and interests while recognizing that the trade-off is deep wisdom, richer connections with others, and detachment from empty rewards. Brooks says it’s important, as we get older, to let go of the illusion that our achievements and accolades can sustain us, because they are ephemeral: they begin to dissipate almost as soon as we get them.  He explains that the path to happiness in later life lies not in continuing to rack up successes (which gets harder and harder, particularly in certain professions), or in attempting to live off the emotional spoils of our legacy. Through seven years of research and interviews, Brooks discovered that happiness in later life comes not in continued striving (which is a strength we enjoy most in our younger years), but in tending to our relationships, and in embracing the “deep wisdom”—a more enduring and rewarding strength–that (if we are lucky) has come with age.

I’m not ready to give up the thrill of seeing a new writing project in print, and a win on the pickleball court still delights. Still, I can see the beginnings of one curtain dropping as another one lifts. I no longer have the drive to make a name for myself, to show up on some lighted billboard for an accolade that is sexy but fleeting. More and more I find myself appreciating not just the challenges of pickleball, but the players, who have become my friends. I think this must be how the march from one strength to another begins: as a kind of ping-ponging back and forth between your current world and a new and potentially more resonant one, until such time as you put down one ball entirely, and step fully and fruitfully into a whole different game.

Last night at a restaurant some distance from Chattanooga, I did something I regret: I lodged a complaint. Well, not exactly a complaint. It was more like an unwelcome clarification. What happened was that I ordered what the menu called a roasted beet salad appetizer, but what arrived did not actually contain roasted beets. I don’t think I was wrong about this: I’ve made my share of roasted beets, and of my four dining companions, at least one other agreed that what lay sprawled across my plate was roasted beets’ flaccid fraternal twin: beets that had been either canned, or pickled, or both. So I suggested this to the waiter.

It was a clarification he did not take well to. His smile departed. His demeanor hardened. The beets were as described, he said; he knew because he had watched them being prepared. While I had my doubts about the veracity of his account—research studies have proven time and again that eyewitness testimony is fraught with bias—I didn’t want to argue. I liked the salad, I assured him. I just happen to be a stickler for truth in marketing. I did not say this last part. Nevertheless, there would be no more kindness from our waiter, who moments before had seemed so delighted by our presence.

That night I Googled the proper way to lodge a complaint in a restaurant. In a nutshell, you should be polite, mention the problem as soon as you’re aware of it (not after you’ve polished off your meal), and be clear about how you’d like it resolved. I’m happy to say that I was, I think, polite, and I did mention the beets immediately. I didn’t suggest a resolution, however, because aside from the salad being an uninspired lie of an appetizer, it was perfectly fine to eat. My husband and I are decades out from the days when we turned our noses up at the canned, pickled beet slabs that topped every Italian restaurant salad, until the day we actually tried one and liked it, after which we vied for who got the bigger slab. What I’m saying is, I find beets in any form pretty acceptable, but more importantly, those restaurants never pretended their beets were anything they weren’t.

So I was bothered by our waiter’s defensiveness. I’m reminded of the story about my husband’s ex-girlfriend, who sent back a steak so many times the chef himself finally came out to their table, took her by the hand, and said, “Come. Let’s cook this steak together.” That, my friends, is accommodation in action, and that isn’t anything like what I was looking for.

Which makes me wonder what, exactly, I was looking for. Since I wasn’t requesting a replacement salad with actual roasted beets, did I just need to flex my gastronomical muscle? As foodies go, I’m about a four on a scale of one to ten. I’m a respectable cook who has never sickened anyone (there was some suspect turkey once that did cause my husband to vomit, but in my defense, I ate it too, and I was fine). And while I do have a fantasy of opening a soup café one day, I realize that having a repertoire of three good soups does not a café make. But of everything in the world of cooking I do not understand or have patience for—and this includes, apparently, turkey safety, as well as a well thought-out soup philosophy—roasted beets are something I actually do understand. And maybe that’s why I had to say something.

In the end, my husband’s ex-girlfriend did not go to the kitchen to help the chef cook her steak, and I did not go to the kitchen to watch my chef roast beets, so it’s really anyone’s guess whether she could have taught her chef a thing or two, and whether I might have caught ours in a tangled web of alternative beet facts. In thinking about it (at length, it turns out), I believe that all I wanted last night was for the waiter to say, “You’re right.” Maybe he could have explained that they just couldn’t get their hands on fresh beets, or that they sold out of them moments before we arrived, all dressed up and with a yearning for roasted root vegetables. Either of these responses would have made it all ok. Because in my opinion, the raw truth is always more satisfying than a half-baked defense.