Two First Times: Beach Tennis and a Psychoanalytic Café

Over the past few days I had two new experiences: I played beach tennis for the first time, and I took part in my first psychoanalytic café, at Instituto Plural. Very different things, but when I stopped to think about it, I noticed both depended on the same thing: a group of people managing to fit a time slot into their schedule to make that moment happen.

A moment from the gathering at Instituto Plural, a space dedicated to Psychoanalysis and Psychology in Bagé.

With the psychoanalytic café, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I imagined something more formal, almost like a lecture. Before walking in, I felt a flash of fear about feeling isolated, since it seemed like everyone there already knew each other. I went anyway, and found out none of that was true — it was just people sitting in a circle, coffee on the table, a question sparking the conversation, and everyone incredibly welcoming. What struck me most was seeing people disagree and change their mind mid-sentence, not trying to be right — just genuinely thinking together.

Beach tennis was the opposite: zero theory, just the game. But the effect was similar — leaving the house, meeting people, being part of something that only exists because several people decided to show up.

The beach tennis court where I played for the first time.

It got me thinking about how much of what’s worthwhile — even simple things — depends on community. There’s an idea from Winnicott I like to come back to: the capacity to be alone, in a healthy way, develops in the presence of another person. We only learn to be okay with ourselves after having first been accompanied. It holds up on the outside too: trying new things feels lighter when you’re not doing it alone.

I keep collecting these first times. And I like noticing that most of them only happened because someone else was there.