#1321 - a thin line
"The little things? The little moments? They aren't little."—Jon Kabat-Zinn
A few recent events on the news reminded me of the thin line between failure and success, life and death. It's a liminal space on which we all walk, yet it is so narrow we can't see it.
And probably it's a good thing. We wouldn't be able to move otherwise, crippled by fear.
We can observe this narrow liminal space in sports. Most of the time, winning or losing depends on the tiniest of details. A rock among thousands that you hit with a slightly different angle on an enduro race, and you are on the floor. Usually, you would just fall, get back and restart. But at that moment, your body has one degree of rotation more than usual, and you hit your shoulder and break it. End of your race.
The devil is in the details, as they say.
There are plenty of stories like this on every sport. The millimetre that makes the difference between scoring the winning goal and suffering a painful loss. The fraction of a second of delay in a reaction to your opponent's movement and your ko.
Same thing in life.
It's the attention to details that make the difference.
Attention expands that narrow space.
Yet, attention requires energy, and if we pay attention to everything, we risk standing still. So, we must make a conscious choice on where we want to focus our attention. And then accept that it's a thin line and walk it anyway.