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Can someone translate this
Time to consider time
Jon Carroll
San Francisco Chronicle
"The clock is your friend." - Tim Duncan
Tim Duncan is a professional basketball player. He plays for the San Antonio Spurs. He has been voted to 11 all-star teams, 11 all-NBA teams and 11 all-defensive teams. His team has won the NBA championship four times. It probably won't win this year - key injuries, although not to Duncan - but the playoffs just started this weekend. As I've remarked before, you never know.
What is most notable about Duncan, though, is his almost preternatural calm. His face rarely changes expression. He accepts the bad breaks and the lucky bounces without histrionics. Some people have complained that he's boring to watch play, but those people have not focused on him for an entire game. He may have the face of a Zen master, but he has the elbows of a street fighter.
And the clock is his friend.
For a lot of us - probably for most of us - the clock is not our friend. We have a deadline. We don't know what to do. Suddenly the clock speeds up in that way that clocks have. Only an hour left. What we have at the moment is absolute garbage. The clock is not our friend.
The clock is Tim Duncan's friend. Soon the game will be over. Maybe it's a close game. Maybe he will make the game-winning shot. And maybe he won't. Maybe his shot will clatter off the back rim. But see, here's the thing: The clock is still his friend. He ran out of time and he lost, but that did not change his relationship with the clock.
(I may be projecting a little bit here. I will acknowledge that you may think that. I actually don't believe that I'm projecting, but I don't want y'all to think I've gone around the bend. Although here, around the bend: better scenery.)
And there are times when the clock does not move at all. There's a wonderful cartoon in the April 20 issue of the New Yorker. It shows Albert Einstein sitting in the waiting room at an airport. He has his suitcase beside him. He is alone in a row of chairs. His shoulders are slumped. The caption: "Einstein discovers that time can stop completely."
You've been there. I've been there. The clock is not our friend. The hands of the clock do not change position. We've entered the waiting room wormhole, where our relative motion is zero. Our actual motion is zero. Our brains are empty, echoing rooms. Maybe we have a laptop, but come on - a laptop! How often do you get to experience a rift in the space-time continuum?
Besides, a laptop almost always brings bad news. This is its function. Do you need to be becalmed at O'Hare and hear that your company is considering more layoffs? I'd say: probably not.
But Tim Duncan is visualizing. It's six minutes to go in the fourth quarter, and his team is ahead by a dozen. That seems comfortable, but Duncan knows that comfort is a chump's game. The clock is his friend. He knows that if he works really hard, he can build the lead to 20 with four minutes to go, and then the Spurs will have achieved, as the announcers say, separation.
Duncan has achieved a detente with time. It doesn't matter what the clock says because the clock is always presenting an opportunity. Maybe you need to slow down; maybe you need to speed up. The clock will tell you what you need to do. Why? Because it is your friend.
Most of us can't live like that. We are governed by the clock, or we have decided not to be governed by the clock. Either way, it's not our friend. But if you really, truly want to live in the moment, the clock has to be your friend. The clock defines the moment - admittedly in a sort of arbitrary system based on the sun, but with unnatural elements like 60 minutes in an hour (why 60?) and 60 seconds (again) in a minute, but ultimately in tune with the cosmos except for that leap year thing.
But if the clock is your friend, you have accepted everything about the measurement of time. You've even accepted leap year. When Tim Duncan plays on Feb. 29, he tries just as hard as on the other days. So I am asking you, in the spirit of peace and harmony in these difficult times - be like Tim. Embrace the clock. Not literally, of course.
The clock is indeed your friend.
As long as a basketball player is your role model, you really can't go wrong - except for those guys who spend a lot of time in the parking lots of strip clubs.
Can someone translate this
My vote for the top 5 oddest article of the season...and that's saying a lot considering we have Jeff McDonald as the Spurs beatwriter!
I really don't understand it...I thought it would be about how Duncan still has a lot of game left in him since his game is about skill, not athleticism, but this reads more like an odd poem
I thought it was brilliant.
Time itself, and the clock as a measuring device for it, can be your friend whether you have too much of it or not enough.
It defines the moment and your place within it. And it gives you the information you need to make the best choice.
There's something about it. It's linked on the E-N Spurs page. They don't link other work very often.
Somebody is playing his Dead Head and Jefferson Airplane records.
If you think about it, the clock...oh, crap...I don't have time to respond...
Umm...
Well, they probably figured since the National media attention has been on Tony Parker, why not throw in whatever Duncan article they could find!
I think he found some of the good shrooms.
Well, they probably figured since the National media attention has been on Tony Parker, why not throw in whatever Duncan article they could find!
Parker deserves the attention. Duncan's probably happy to be the second thought. He prefers to be out of the spotlight.
Somebody is playing his Dead Head and Jefferson Airplane records.
or smoking something...
Tiiiiiiiiiiiiyiiiiiiiiime is on my side, yes it is!!
I can't believe this is a serious newspaper article
I thought it was a Onion-type of piece at first, but then it wasn't funny.
A person's use of, and relationship to, time is more important and more useful than most anything he will read in a newspaper. Open your minds, people. You don't have to be a hippie or a druggie to get it.
is this actually in English?
I thought it was funny. In a random, Demetri Martin(his standup where he talks about college, donuts, and writing stuff that written backwards is still the same thing.) kind of way.I can't believe this is a serious newspaper article
I thought it was a Onion-type of piece at first, but then it wasn't funny.
I'm not sure if the writer ever figured out the point to his own article. If he did, he didn't share it with us.
Good read.
Tim's concept of time is different from the average person. I wonder what else Tim can tell us about quantum mechanics, string theory, dark matter, field theory, etc.
How to Say Nothing in 4300 characters.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
You can tell somebody something, but you can't make him think.
I could explain the article to you...
I just cant understand it for you...
Wow, come on people, it's not a difficult concept.
I think some of you are making it out to be more complex than it really is.
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