If you have never been to the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows, you ought to go just once. The place is a majestic testament to human ingenuity, creativity, will power and engineering. I recall with fondness the quaint, old, 13,000-seat Forest Hills Stadium where I first saw Bob Dylan in concert. Those pretty green tennis courts are a thing of the past.

The National Tennis Center now has Arthur Ashe Stadium with a seating capacity of 23,517 right next to the Louis Armstrong Stadium with a seating capacity of 20,000. That’s 43,000 seats compared to Forest Hill’s 13,000. Indeed, things just keep on getting better. The two weeks of the U.S. Open bring in perhaps $300 million, if not more, which is an impressive number. A stroll through the grounds provides you with all the champagne, chocolate mousse and Quiche Lorraine you could ever desire. It’s quite a show.

And then we have the players. Serena Williams gave us a tearful goodbye and though Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic were nowhere in sight, there is new blood in the form of players like Carlos Alcatraz of Spain. He’s the kid with movie star looks, indefatigable energy and a power serve. Then we have the sweetness of Frances Tiafoe, the first American to make it to the semis at the U.S. Open since Andy Roddick back in 2006.

The two new stars met in the semi-finals and I watched their marathon match to the bitter end. All those grunts and groans. Five sets of pain over a four-hour period. And I wondered what keeps these guys going.

Which begs the broader question of what are human beings seeking as they sacrifice blood, sweat and tears to get to the end? What do they expect to find there? The Holy Grail? Are they pleased when they find it? Better yet, do they ever find it? In the first version of “Perceval, the Story of the Holy Grail” by Chretien de Troyes, Perceval never found the grail at all. In all the later versions of the grail story, a pure and chaste knight does find the grail and brings it back to the king to restore health to the kingdom. Probably the Chretien de Troyes version is the most honest, however.

As one of my patients told me after he won a PGA event, “Is that all there is?” Exactly right. That’s all there is. A winner’s check, a trophy and time to go back to the hotel to get some much needed sleep. The whole affair is a bit disappointing.

There have been many great works of art that have asked this question of the heart’s desire to achieve the impossible. In the musical “Man of La Mancha,” the song “The Impossible Dream” begins with the lines:
“To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go”

The play “Faust” by Goethe is about a man who has an unquenchable thirst for more knowledge and sells his soul to the devil to find it. “Moby Dick” by Melville is about Ahab, a man who is insanely searching to find and kill Moby Dick, the great white whale. John Guare’s play “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” was about the writer’s endless quest to find ultimate knowledge.

And the great psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas coined the term “transformational objects,” which describes mankind’s endless search for an experience that will finally give them some peace. Sartre’s existential novel “Nausea” is about the same hopeless quest to find an answer to the question of why we are alive and how to grasp some joy that always seems just out of reach. In the novel the protagonist’s favorite song is by Ella Fitzgerald, which starts with the words of the title: “Some of these days you’re gonna miss me, honey.”

Great tennis players, young and old, writers, lyricists and probably all adults in general are looking for the ultimate answer to life’s big question, which is how to find a little happiness. Happiness is the Holy Grail of life that seems forever hidden away and just out of reach.
One must say in the end, that whether you win the U.S. Open or whether you lose it or whether you just watched it on the tube, we all are in the same boat — this thing we call life. So I guess the answer is to enjoy the ride for it will not last forever.

In the film “Annie Hall” Alvy Singer opens the film with a monologue: “There’s an old joke that goes like this: Two elderly women are in a restaurant, a Catskills restaurant. One of them says, ‘Boy, the food in this place is terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know. And such small portions.’ Well, that’s how I feel about life. Full of misery, loneliness and suffering and unhappiness. And it’s over much too quickly.”