6/24/2023 0 Comments Your chronicle dim cave![]() And now, we all have some time to breathe, to reflect, and to think about our respective foundations before things start happening so quickly again because they will. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Life happens far too quickly for us to think about it.” I coach goalies and the game truly does happen too quickly for much conscious thought: goalies need the time and space of training (and, now, a quarantine) to hone their fundamentals for when competition resumes. Likewise with the rational side of our lives. Knowing this, we can overcome that inclination and do what’s actually in our best, long-term, interests. They are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, having not caught up to the modern age. Our brains aren’t designed to maximize our flourishing in a modern-day world. Because as we know from our study of Philosophy and the human condition, short-term dopamine boosts just aren’t what we really want. You don’t get riled up and you won’t get the easy dopamine boosts you’ve been getting from your bipolar news and social media. So, you can imagine your Thinking Coach bringing you back to the fundamentals. Most people haven’t revisited their foundation-building courses recently such as philosophy, statistics, logic, neuroscience: all components of establishing a sound foundation for thinking and democracy. ![]() Defeated by an onslaught of nuance and, over the past six months, having very little time to step back and really frame what’s going on. Regardless of your political stance and party affiliation, you’ve likely been rocked. We’re still not playing competitive, full-contact games, but when we do, I’m excited for the athletes to put their new foundation to work.Īnd so it goes for all of us: the concerned citizens, the philosophy students, and everyone in between. I’m now able to run some of our quantitative tests which measure core skills required for water polo players and we are seeing an improvement like nothing we’ve seen before. I had the added bonus of athletes pleading for more because, it turns out, fundamentals and technique (and conditioning) only, is infinitely better than no sports at all. Without the ability to have any contact whatsoever, and during the summer months when we couldn’t even pass a ball, only fundamentals and technique remained. So, for me as a coach, the horrors of this pandemic have yielded at least some very small silver lining. They often don’t consciously recognize that for Michael Jordan to dribble left, cross over to his right, and stop on a dime to hit a jumper, he executed countless hours of core fundamentals, working on simply dribbling the ball correctly, with his knees at a precise angle, until his forearm burned so much he could hardly hold his Gatorade bottle. Teaching fundamentals is often the biggest challenge for a coach, leaving room for pithy phrases like, “How to put the ‘fun’ in ‘fundamentals.’” Young athletes, understandably, want to do the actual “fun” stuff: what they see Jordan doing on the court. (They also tend to condition the heck out of their athletes, but that’s a different, albeit relevant, part of this.) As Michael Jordan once opined, “Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” When a sports team gets rocked-really beaten badly on repeated instances, failing to counter the nuanced schemes of recent opponents-good coaches nearly unanimously do one thing: return to fundamentals. Let me entertain an analogy from the other part of my job description over these past 20 years as an interscholastic water polo coach. ![]() While I do agree we’ve been given a unique motivation to delve into the nuance of what “he” and “she” and “they” have said, I think we have an even greater opportunity for something more fruitful: getting back to the basics. These recent months and these past four years have been wrought with a divided country, he-said-she-said-they-said banter, and a mountain of facts and data and fake-news that could fill an entire semester. But I’ve gone in exactly the opposite direction. I’ve taught philosophy for the past 20 years and, over the past few months and especially in light of the attack on the Capitol, the running joke is that the United States government has provided me with a full month’s worth of lectures.
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