Relative Something

It’s all in the timing. The trick is, each of us measure it differently. Some people become fixated on it and others make a conscious decision to disregard it. My time that remains prior to departure for the Himalayan trek is now inside 2 weeks. I’m hoping to pull together the many little things I’ve been doing to prepare and this weekend maybe even pack as if I were leaving, in order to better sense if there is something I have overlooked. This would give me time to take care of things if I find I don’t have what I need or want. I guess I am also interested to determine whether I have too much. Not too much time, but too much stuff.

I’ve made time to watch some basketball of the NCAA Men’s Tournament. As with almost all sports, time is all-critical. Obviously, there is the shot-clock to be managed, repeatedly throughout the game, and then the final buzzer to be beaten. But most importantly, the timing of each and every decision, as well as the athletic ability to respond in critical time to each decision, reveals outcomes of success and failure. For me it provides the beauty or the banality of the game. There are many times when players are so totally open to receive a pass, yet that moment is so incredibly short, infinitesimally small even, that completing it doesn’t happen. If their timing is off, the game can seem boring as hell. And when it is on, I find it a work of art.

Some athletes speak of slowing the action down in their minds, or of feeling as if that is what happens to them when they get in a ‘zone’. But I think the real secret is in the ability to think ahead. Anticipate what is about to happen and you just might be ready when it does. Maybe that is just another way of describing the same phenomenon, I don’t know. Makes it pretty fascinating with regard to team sports when you think about the nuances of timing and are able to witness a group of individuals mesh in ultimate synchronized anticipation and micro-second reactions, to achieve success. Especially when they are doing it against another team of individuals employing the same skills and effort to thwart them all the while.

I measure the time in two ways: the time remaining is getting short and yet it is still a long time until I leave. It is all relative.