A thought last night while driving through Brockville – a passing memory of a coach’s speech to the team, some 20-odd years ago. It was one of his better ones, but not one we much wanted to hear. See, Brockville reminded me of it not because the race was held there, but the team that beat us soundly was from there.
“I didn’t see Brockville in the swimming pool last night. I didn’t see Brockville in the bowling alley. And I didn’t see Brockville at the Dairy Queen. But I saw them at the finish line, collecting their medals.”
Like I said, 20-some years ago. And in the past month or so, I’ve written about the importance of what you don’t do, and on being a racehorse, and probably one or two other related posts.
The product of wisdom percolating from those early lessons? Not so much. Just me rediscovering the same lessons again and again. Check back in another 20 years and you’ll probably find me “learning” something from one of these posts all over again.
The lessons don’t really change much. Our circumstances certainly (usually) do though, and since it’s next to impossible to file away every lesson that doesn’t seem relevant at the time, or appears to only apply to one narrow area, I’m guessing/hoping it’s natural to rediscover and reapply things from the past.
Of course, back then I didn’t blog, and I didn’t keep a journal, so the act of reflecting on the issues I’m having on a day to day basis, combined with a periodic review to see how I’m progressing. That’s partly planned work, but I also log my hours in my journal so I have to review as far as a month back from time to time to pull out reports, which gives me a chance to glance back at my mindset and worries that, luckily, often tend to seem tiny in retrospect, and just looking back for cross-linkable material in the blog is a great way to revisit topics.
I used to have a theory that everyone in a given society/culture/niche pretty much learns the same body of stuff by the time they’re 30. Then I learned it’s more about how (or if) you apply it than how and when you learn it. Now I’m trying to figure out how to reduce the repetition of those lessons.
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