Lost in Translation
Over the course of my life, I've traveled to many places around the world. I've worked, coached, and played in many arenas and stadiums - some timeless and never-changing, others rebuilt. All incredible spectacles to behold that seat sports fans by the thousands. And I've spent quality time with people of different cultures and nations, who cherish different values that I highly respect and have learned greatly from. I am truly thankful for having the opportunity during my lifetime to go the places I've gone, to do the things I've done, and to see and meet the many, many people I've met in the name of sports. If given the chance to do it all over again, I would do it with a heightened sense of gratitude and pleasure that I was unable to experience the first time around.
My collective experiences as both an athlete and a coach in a country, a world foreign to my own, have given me a drive and motivation that I might not otherwise have at this moment in time. In a world that shares many different languages, I hunger for a real language. And never before have I been driven by this hunger to understand what I consider to be the most important language in the world. It is not a spoken or written language. Both of these forms of language come with their own healthy populations of opinionated, lying, blustering, narcissists and foolish individuals that often say one thing and do another. People who make empty promises, etc. They are all too common, even if they themselves are unaware of it.
The form of language I seek daily rises above anything that can ever be written or spoken by the tongue. It is what I consider to be the truth. You see, the truth–in any language–does not consist of mere words. The truth is what we see. It is the action as it unfolds and becomes interpreted. It is the event taking place - the dance between cause and effect. It is the result.
The truth is what your eyes allow for you to see and process, millisecond by millisecond, until the event ceases to unfold no more. The truth is witnessing triumph and defeat in the eyes of opponents; it is seeing love, respect, appreciation, happiness or sorrow in another human being without them ever having said a single word in any spoken language. This is real language and one that never needs to be translated. Attempts to translate this language into spoken or written words leaves room for error.
In competition, as in real life, often lost in translation is this truth. As a coach, I teach players when competing to look into the helmets of their opponents when they are close enough, find their eyes. In those eyes they will find the truth; where a player will run next, what they want to do, who a player will throw to, and when the ball is close to them. Listen to what is being told to you. These truths cannot be spoken or heard - they can only be observed. And finding these truths often can make a difference between making a great play or giving a great play to you opponent. Find the truth and don’t allow it to be translated into what it is not, by those who don’t share your vision.
Stride with Power
Randy