One Apple A Day #585 - rituals and lines
As you probably know from some of my past posts, I'm a petrolhead. Or gearhead, depending on where you're from. I love motorcycle and car racing. In a race, both machines and people are pushed to their limit. When you're going at 300Kmh on a track, there is no time to think about your next move or how to approach the next turn.
If you listen to a racer interview, you may hear them talking about "lines", or better, the ideal line or trajectory. On every track, there is usually one ideal line. It is the one that maximizes the speed in every point of the circuit while minimizing the distance covered. Following the perfect line make a massive difference between a winning lap and a poor one.
So, every racer spends some time to learn that line. Finding it, it's a combination of science, knowledge, feelings and plenty of practice.
But even when you have found that perfect line, it's not easy to stay on it for a whole race. Circumstances evolve during a race: there are all the other racers aiming at that line too, the changing weather, the evolving grip of the tarmac and the tyres, and the increasing fatigue both physical and mental.
This is why racers need clues. They fix in their memories a set of visual clues along the circuit that they use to quickly understand if they are on the perfect line. After a while, they are not even conscious of those clues. They just sense them and then act accordingly.
Rituals for me are like those clues. I design them to help me stay on my ideal line. The one that connects me with the person I want to become. Every time something pulls me away from my ideal line, my rituals help me getting back to it.