Posts Tagged ‘Timing’
Wait, Don’t
Some things wait and some things don’t. I was contemplating writing about the subject of patience. You know the saying, “Wait for it, wait for iiiit”? It’s all about not jumping the gun. Not being so over-eager as to miss the better opportunity that presents itself in the next moment.
Don’t ask me about that question of how you know there is a better opportunity coming in the next moment. I have no idea. That is the mystery. That is why, when it happens… when you do wait and are rewarded with the prime opportunity, it is so magical.
The place I see this manifest most often is in the sports of indoor soccer and floorball that I play. If you rush your decision, the number of times you succeed in your objective is less than when you have the patience to delay your action. I watched this happen several times yesterday as players in front of me held the ball long enough for the defensive position to get impatient and shift, opening up a new opportunity to score which the shooters then took full advantage of. It was a beautiful. It’s the magic of the game!
However, on my way home from work, my focus on the art of waiting became distracted by Mother Nature. There is no waiting going on out there right now. Tree branches are filling with buds of new leaf growth. Dandelions are blossoming en masse. Shrubs are going gonzo with new growth, and any plan I had of doing some preliminary pruning to improve their shapes before the new growth happened is now well past the prime opportunity moment.
Another classic lesson on the duality of things in this life. Things aren’t so much either/or as they are both/and. Things wait, and things don’t.
Timing
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.
Relative Something 