“ESPN & A Lesson in Life”
by Kelvin H. Chin
Life After Life Expert & Meditation Teacher
Let’s say there is an important conversation between an NFL coach and a key player on his team.
It becomes the main topic of all the sports radio talk shows and analysts on ESPN TV shows nationwide. But none of those analysts or talk show hosts were there in the room to witness or hear that conversation.
So what do they do? They conjecture. Based on what? Their own beliefs and perspectives on the topic. Here, on sports. On NFL football. Based on how they’ve seen and heard the coach and key player interact in the past. But in life, in reality, are the analysts right? Accurate? Not always. Not if you ask the coach and this player.
Sounds familiar, right? You see it happening every day.
And even if they were there in the room eavesdropping on the conversation, how would they interpret what was said? In as many ways as there were reporters in the locker room. Right?
And what if the analysts and sports radio talk show hosts weren’t even in the room to hear the coach and player’s conversation? What if there was no recording capability? What if your only sources of information were stories passed down through conversations among unknown people for many decades before they got to you? And then your job was to capture it all in a document. Later turned into a book.
And what if the “you” were collected accounts from many people of what was supposedly going on and allegedly said between that coach and key player in the NFL 50-60 years earlier in the 1950’s?
How “accurate” would that book be?
And what if the book claimed to know the intent of the coach and player in that all-important single conversation that we’re highlighting here. That one out of thousands of conversations they had over the three years working together on that NFL team.
How trusting would you be of the reliability of that book?
I would argue that even if you were in the room during that conversation and heard every word, that you could never be certain of the speaker’s intent. No one can ever fully know another person’s mind, their intent. At best it’s guessing.
And if those conjectures about intention are based on stories passed down for 60 years from hundreds of sports enthusiasts in the 1950’s, 60’s, etc., then what are we left to think about the “Why” the coach said what he supposedly said to the player, and vice versa?
Who the heck knows...and is it even important?
I think not.
I think more importance should be put on the overall “presentation.” How did the team perform. And how did the coach go about getting the team to perform so well. And did the coach take perhaps a different approach? Different from his predecessors and contemporaries.
That’s where we should focus and perhaps learn from.
Instead of arguing about the details of a conversation or conversations that existed long before anybody thought to document what was said. Or about intent, which is never known.
Focus on what we do know. Not on what we don’t.
Focus on the presentation, the display of excellence on and off the playing field and how they went about accomplishing that. Take lessons from that and apply them to our lives today, if we can, wherever it makes sense.
Focus on the larger message and don’t get tangled up in the weeds.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 40 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.
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