Like Jesus , Francis of Assisi did some pretty outrageous things. Everybody knows how he went and preached to the birds, but not everybody knows why he did it. It wasn't, as certain 1970s movies would have it, because he was a nature-loving hippie (although I do love Donavan's soundtrack, especially the theme song). It was because the human beings he was preaching to wouldn't listen. He had wanted to preach the word of God in Rome, but when he arrived there, the people scorned him because he was dressed poorly, so they thought him an idiot. He tried for several days to gain their attention, but could not overcome their hardness of heart. "I grieve deeply over your misfortune," he told them, "because you are not only spurning me as a servant of Christ, but you are also really despising Him in me, since I have been preaching to you the Gospel of the Redeemer of the world. And so I am now leaving Rome. And I call as witness of your desolation Him who is t
"I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it."
ReplyDeleteI don't know why I have so much trouble stalling. It makes me uncomfortable. I don't like being creamed in slow-mo. I can't make myself move slower than I normally do. I guess I'm just not used to thinking in terms of time, because I haven't been to many tournaments. Anyway, I hope you did great this weekend and had a lot of fun.
Plan D was my fallback, given to me by one of my best friends who was coaching me. I was totally losing it in Div III. Couldn't concentrate at all. All I had in my head was how well I had done the day before (in Div II)--which was useless. I was impatient, arrogant, not taking my opponents seriously, and they were clobbering me, and rightly so. I was throwing myself at them thinking I should get the touch, rather than watching them, knowing that they could hit me if I made a mistake (which I kept doing, over and over again). I said to my friend, "I just can't get my head in this today!" And she said, "But you had a whole minute left on the clock that time. What were you thinking?! Use the time." And then she gave me my goal for the day: "Use the whole three minutes."
ReplyDeleteIt worked. It got my head out of the past and back into the game and it gave me a way of forcing myself to be patient. I won two pool bouts, enough to make the cut. And then I won my first D-E 13-12 by stalling in the last 16 seconds so that my opponent would think I was trying to hit her, but in fact I was just running the clock down. Devious, but effective! It's all part of the game.