Make Light Real

Neil October 2nd, 2007

THE ZONE - I don’t know how I’d like to highlight it but I feel strongly enough about it that I made a category for it.

My first concrete realization of my zone was my freshman year of college in writing class. Unfortunately, I was critically bored…my highschool education had been more complete than my freshman year of college and I felt it was an awfully expensive year of review. Anyway, complaints aside I was assigned to write a descriptive paper about ‘my favorite place’. The creative genius that I am I defied the professor the gratification of two pages ripped from the thesaurus like all the other robots, I mean students, in the class. I wrote proudly that my favorite place, was not a place at all but a frame of mind I called motion. Not only motion, but motion that slowed motion. Movement that stopped action. A place, where in my paper I described it from the seat of my mountain bike, that ceased conscious thought and where my mind could be in a serene state of balance between exertion and reaction. A place where I could think faster than the tires crossed the trail - without effort. A place which undoubtedly saved me from several broken bones, face plants and scrapes.

On particularly humorous incident occurred on the face of a near vertical drainage ditch between the art building and girls dorm of my college campus. We’re talking about a roughly 30 foot hill, at probably 110º, the top of which emiates from a paved sidewalk, connecting to a side street and across wich is the main campus. It’s a hilly campus, to which ends boys headed up the hill might be tempted to cut up this washed out piece of hill on the loose stones to get to their dorm faster. I’m returning from riding my bike on the trails one afternoon and decide to enjoy the freefall down this hill and ride the speed out through the quad to my dorm on the other side of campus. So I drop in, upon which I see someone walking up the hill on the gravel. Brakes are great, but on a steep gravel decline which I’ve iniated with a small hop - full braking only leads to a skid. So I’m now sideways, approaching unsespecting and stupified student at increasing speed. Full fishtail in progress I am barely staying upright and sliding sideways into a stump from my momentum coming over the top. I hit the stump and I am instantly airborne, not more than 10 feet from the jaw dropping student. Upon examination of my inirta and the angle of the hill, my brain (independent of my input) quickly initiates a shoulder roll - spins me back up on my feet literally 2 feet in front of the onlooking student. As my biking shoes skid to a halt on the loose stones and my knees start to knock the rush of adrenaline jolting through them - I give the student intrupting my ride a few choice words and jump back up hill to rescue my precious bike. Interestingly enough I crashed hard enough that day to put a dent in the downbar of my Trek mountainbike - yet my body’s experience in the zone allowed me to walk away without a scratch (scratch meaning trip to the hospital). Do you have a story from THE ZONE?
I can attribute my ability to get in the zone to my success as a soccer goal keeper. I can recall specific plays from my highschool and college soccer games in ’slow motion’ clarity even these 15 years later. So is there something uniquely wierd about my brain - you bet - but many other people experience these same type of reactions and are also able to slow down time. So the question becomes ‘Can you put yourself there by discipline?’ Josh Waitzkin writes of his experience with the Human Performance Institute and their refining of a training program to allow a person to train themselves to find an optimum zone for performance. The technique to put yourself near, or into THE ZONE Josh calls ‘the trigger’. In order to reach the zone you have to define a path for yourself, then train your mind to shorten that path to a smaller and manageable routine. How to find a build a trigger will be tomorrow’s topic, but one clue is there’s music involved…

Josh trained at the sports psychology organization called the Human Performance Institute, and you can take their free intro profile test here if you like. I have no idea how their full profile could be worth $49 to you, but if you take it and it helps you leave your experiences in the comments.

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• Inspiration , On Art , The Zone , how to , learning